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Old 02-04-08, 08:00 AM   #2
JackSpratts
 
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The Democratization of the Music Industry
Jeff Price

As I write this, iTunes ranks as the 2nd largest seller of music in the U.S. -- only Wal-Mart's physical stores sell more. Digital revenue is real, and there is a lot of it being earned. Sales from iTunes alone can provide a band enough revenue to achieve true financial success. Don't take my word for it, just look at some of the sales by the following unsigned artists utilizing the Net for both digital distribution and marketing: Kelly sold over 500,000 songs in five months, Eric Hutchinson sold 120,000 songs in three weeks, The Medic Droid sold over 25,000 copies of a single in 45 days, Crank Squad sold over 20,000 songs in 30 days, Secondhand Serenade sold over 225,500 songs in three months, Jason Reeves sold over 20,000 songs in December 2007 and the list goes on and on. Unlike a physical store, digital stores like iTunes have unlimited shelf space allowing everything to be in stock. If the virtual shelves fill up, another hard drive is popped in to make more shelf space. In addition, inventory never runs out; the music simply replicates itself on demand each time it is bought.

After 17 years of running my record label spinART Records, I shut it down. The advent and general adoption of the Internet, digital media and hardware took control of the global music industry away from the record labels and media outlets and handed it to the masses. For the first time in history, through sites like TuneCore, all music creators can choose to be their own record label. There are no longer subjective gatekeepers controlling who gets let "in," promoted and exposed. The choice is ours. Now, anyone can be famous.

In 1991, I asked my high school friend if I could help him release an indie rock band compilation CD called "One Last Kiss," he said "yes" and spinART Records was born. For the next 17 years I co-ran the label and had the privilege of releasing many of the bands on my high school and college mix tapes (The Pixies, Camper Van Beethoven, Roddy Frame (Aztec Camera), Echo & The Bunnymen, The Church, Richard Thompson, and more) as well as a large number of other bands discovered post college (Lilys, Lotion, Clem Snide, Apples In Stereo, The Dears, Poole, etc.).

In 1996, I cold-called Ken Goes, then manager for the Pixies and Frank Black, in an attempt to convince him that our band Lotion should open for Frank Black on his upcoming national tour. While on the phone, Ken put me on hold for about two minutes. When he returned he told me the deal he had been working on with another record label to release the new Frank Black & The Catholics album had just fallen through -- Frank Black would not grant them the digital rights as they had already been assigned to another company called GoodNoise (now called eMusic). I told Ken this would not be a problem for me. spinART went on to release the next seven Frank Black & The Catholic albums, a Pixies album and a double disc called Frank Black Francis.

Soon thereafter I met the founders of eMusic and went on to work with them for the next 3 ½ years. spinART Records became the first label in the history of the music industry to put its available catalog up for paid download as MP3s and the education I received helped set the stage to adapt to the inevitable changes about to impact the music industry. I took to the emerging digital sector the way Bush took to weapons of mass destruction.

Over the ensuing years, spinART had its peaks and valleys. By 2004, there were a lot more valleys than peaks. The label still did what it did very well, identifying bands that it believed people would like and making them famous. But there was one big change, in the "old days" the more famous an artist got, the more money the bands and spinART made by selling the music. Almost suddenly, this correlation seemed to be breaking. Necessity being the mother of invention, it got me thinking, what could I do to remain in the music industry under a model that would not rely on selling music (the exploitation model). And thus the idea for a new model was born, turn distribution into a service for a simple up front, one time flat fee.

For the past century, artists could record, manufacture, market, and, to some degree, promote their own music, but no matter if they were The Beatles, Elvis or Led Zepplin, they could not distribute it and get in placed on the shelves of the stores across the country; the required costs and infrastructure of the physical world were just too massive -- a 500,00 square foot warehouse staffed with 30 people, trucks and inventory systems, insurance, a field staff of 30 people walking to music stores leveraging, begging, pleading and paying to get the CD, album, 8-track, wax spool, etc., on the precious shelves of the retail stores -- and checking up afterwards. Distribution was out of the hands of any one person, no matter how dedicated or wealthy. Without the music available to buy, there was no way for it to sell.

Record labels made artists famous and made money off that fame by selling the music -- without the music available to buy, there was no way for it to sell. The record labels exclusively had the relationships with the distributors (and in the case of the "four major record labels" the same company owns both). Therefore, with only one means to the desired end, the goal for many artists was to get "signed" to a label.

Record labels were in a very unique position of power due to their exclusive access to distribution, they were not only the singular gatekeepers to a career for an artist by "signing" them to an exclusive contract, but they were also the subjective "deciders" as to what music was pushed out and promoted to the media outlets. With a "signing," the labels acquired exclusive rights to and from the artist. In return, the label advanced money while providing the relationships, expertise and infrastructure to record, manufacture, market, promote, distribute and sell the music. Of all the artists and music creators in the world, far less than 1% got chosen by the labels due to the risks and economics of the "brick and mortar" world. Of all the music created around the globe, even less has had the opportunity to be discovered and heard by the masses.

And then the world changed thanks to the Internet and digital media.......

For administrative reasons, most of the digital stores like iTunes don't deal directly with the artists -- frankly, customer support for millions of bands (or Uncle Larry, who insists he can do the best version of "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window") are not what the digital stores are about. The stores prefer to get the music from music industry middlemen that aggregate music and deal with the administrative headaches (a record label as one example). The way to meaningful distribution has been reduced from "access plus infrastructure" to merely "access."

With the launch of TuneCore (full disclosure here, I am the CEO and founder), for the cost of a six pack and a pizza (around $30), anyone can now literally be their own record label and have the same distribution as any "signed" artist. However, unlike a "signed" artist, this new model allows artists to keep all their rights and receive all the money from the sale of their music via a non-exclusive agreement that can be cancelled at any time, all while having infinite inventory with no up front cost or risk.

This is analogous to telling a band 15 years ago that if they paid $30, every Tower Record store (god bless its now departed soul) around the world would have their album on its shelf and never run out of stock.

Music marketing and promotion is simply giving music to media outlets in hopes that they play it, talk about it or write about it. In the old days, there were three main media outlets that provided the general population a way to discover music en masse: commercial radio, TV (i.e., MTV, VH1, BET) and print magazines like Rolling Stone.

These three media outlets created a second subjective filter as they decided which music videos to show, albums to write about or singles to play on the radio from a limited pool of artists promoted to them via the labels. If an artist was not on a label, the possibility of getting exposure from any of these three outlets was virtually impossible -- MTV in particular.

Just getting pitched to any three of these media outlets also required a label due to the costs (i.e., making a video, greasing the palms of the programming directors at commercial radio stations, hiring a publicist, etc.) and connections.

Once again, enter the digital age. The Internet has created new media outlets and given everyone global access. Commercial radio is being replaced by Internet based recommendation streaming radio stations like LastFM that let all music in for programming, not just music pushed from the labels. MTV (when they actually played music videos and nothing was being pimped out, dated or real world-ed) has been replaced by sites like YouTube. All anyone needs now is a cell phone to make their own video and broadcast to a potential Internet viewing audience of hundreds of millions. Print magazines have been replaced by MP3 blogs like Stereogum, Gorilla Vs. Bear, PitchforkMedia, My Old Kentucky Blog and many others. These, combined with social networking sites like iLike, MySpace and more, have limitless circulation and the ability to allow readers and users to form a community that listens to, shares, rates, comments on and in some cases, even buys music. Everyone can become their own commercial radio station, magazine and/or TV network, reaching tens of millions of people.

With the restrictions of the physical world removed sites like iTunes have new vehicles allowing people to discover and share free music (make sure to snag a copy of 34 Stars, a 34-artist compilation album available for free download on iTunes

Subjectivity and filters have been removed. All music can be discovered, downloaded, shared, promoted, heard and bought directly by the audience itself. It is truly the democratization of an industry.

As far as the other label functions, these are now affordable and accessible for everyone. For the cost of one day at a studio, you can go to a place like Guitar Center (disclosure again -- Guitar Center have an equity position in TuneCore) and get inexpensive high quality gear to record at home along with lots of knowledgeable experts working the floors to educate and advise. With the removal of a physical medium to deliver the music (i.e., a CD), the barriers and expenses created by physical manufacturing have been removed.

Allowing all music creators "in" is both exciting and frightening. Some argue that we need subjective gatekeepers as filters. No matter which way you feel about it, there are a few indisputable facts -- control has been taken away from the "four major labels" and the traditional media outlets. We, the "masses," now have access to create, distribute, discover, promote, share and listen to any music. Hopefully access to all of this new music will inspire us, make us think and open doors and minds to new experiences we choose, not what a corporation or media outlet decides we should want. It is then the public, not a corporation that gets to decide what is bad and good. The revolution (pun intended) has truly begun.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-p...h_b_93065.html





Apple Passes Wal-Mart, Now #1 Music Retailer in US
Eric Bangeman

Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US in December. Now, Apple has ascended to the top of the charts, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time ever, according to an NPD MusicWatch Survey for the month January contained in an internal Apple e-mail which was leaked to Ars Technica but has not been officially published.

The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica. It includes a screenshot of an Excel file showing the top ten music retailers in the US for January 2008, and Apple is at the top of the list. The iTunes Store leads the pack with 19 percent, Wal-Mart (which includes the brick-and-mortar stores as well as its online properties) is second with 15 percent, and Best Buy is third with 13 percent. Amazon is a distant fourth at 6 percent, trailed by the likes of Borders, Circuit City, and Barnes & Noble. Rhapsody is in the tenth slot with 1 percent.

The fact that a digital-only retailer has ascended to the top of the sales charts is not unexpected, but it does demonstrate just how much the music landscape has changed since the beginning of the decade. The NPD Group has been tracking a "sharp increase" in digital downloads over the past several months as physical sales dry up. According to NPD's research, 48 percent of US teens didn't buy a single CD in 2007, compared to 38 percent in 2006.

Apple sits atop the NPD Group's list. At the request of the NPD we have removed screenshots of the documents in question

It has been a dizzying climb for Apple, which only managed to pass Amazon to become the number three music retailer in June 2007. The biggest surprise is Amazon's drop to the number four slot, which might be explained by consumers using iTunes, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy gift cards to buy music after the holiday season—and those gift cards certainly helped propel Apple to the number-one position.

For the music industry, there is a dark side to Apple's ascension to the top of the charts. Buying patterns for digital downloads are different, as customers are far more likely to cherry pick a favorite track or two from an album than purchase the whole thing. In contrast, brick-and-mortar sales are predominantly high-margin CDs. For 2007, that translated into a 10 percent decline in overall music spending according to the NPD Group, and it's a trend that's expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

Overall, paid downloads accounted for almost 30 percent of all music sold in January, a number that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. With the Big Four labels throwing off the DRM shackles and experimenting with new delivery models like Last.fm's free streaming service, the future looks bright for digital music distribution.

Update: note on "debunking"

We have seen some stories this morning claiming to have debunked this report based on conjecture (no factual detail or analysis). We repeat: the document says what we said it says, and you can see it for yourself. The documents were also distributed to Apple employees, and show Apple as the number-one music retailer during the period in question. That can't be debunked, sorry. (Sure, you can claim that the data is bad, or sampled incorrectly, but there's no proof of that yet.)

Also, I already noted that the results are influenced by gift card usage, and I noted that other retailers on the list have gift cards, too—don't forget that fact. A sale is a sale, as well. We could also argue forever over whether or not gift cards sales matter, but note that no one was bothered by Apple's December results which included a great deal of gift card purchases as well (but didn't inspire any debunking that time around).

This is a monumental event for Apple, because while the company may not be guaranteed the top spot for eternity—or even the following month—it is something many thought would never happen. But in closing, rest assured that this report is accurate.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ler-in-us.html





BofA Sees 3G iPhone Build in May, Predictions "Too Conservative"
Aidan Malley

Further fueling talk of a 3G-capable iPhone this spring, a research note from Bank of America claims knowledge of next-generation Apple handset production beginning in May, and warns that past sales predictions have been timid.

In his message to investors, financial analyst Scott Craig points to channel investigations which show an iPhone capable of faster, third-generation cellular Internet access produced in small numbers in May, with a larger number surfacing in June as Apple prepares a formal rollout for the new device.

"This likely implies a launch announcement in [the second calendar quarter]," Craig says.

Apple is also likely to significantly increase its iPhone production compared to its most recent full quarter. While iPhone production during the holidays totaled 2.3 million, the Bank of America researcher estimates about three million 2G and 3G iPhones made during the spring quarter and a much larger eight or more million during the summer. Each additional million units sold could add about $400 million to Apple's bottom line, Craig notes.

Simultaneous reports on Friday supported the analyst's statements., with the Taiwanese Commercial Times paper alleging that bidding is underway for 3G iPhone manufacturing while Dow Jones ventured so far as to claim that Hon Hai had already won a contract for production of an advanced model.

The investigations of the supply chain have been enough to warrant a significant rethink of longer-term predictions for 2008. As Apple may now produce the same eight million iPhones in one quarter that analysts have been predicting for the entire year, previous estimates are now "starting to look too conservative," according to Craig.

The expert maintained existing forecasts for the rest of Apple's lineup. iPod shipments are estimated to drop by several percentage points year over year for the first quarter, dipping below 10 million units, while a combination of the MacBook Air and refreshes to existing portables is tagged as a likely upside for computer sales.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...rvativ e.html





Over the Line
Gary James

Sometimes all it takes is one hit song to establish yourself in the music business. For Brewer and Shipley that song was "One Toke Over The Line", which was a Top Ten hit back in 1971. That song was not without controversy, but we'll let Michael Brown address that topic as well as a host of others.

Q - The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia Of Rock And Roll described Brewer and Shipley as "Folk Rockers". How accurate would you say that is?

A - I would say that's pretty accurate.

Q - Oh, they're right for a change!

A - Yeah. It's funny you should mention that because when my daughters were young, one day they came home from school and said "Dad, there's a book in the library that you're in!" (laughs) That's the one you're talking about.

Q - Brewer and Shipley formed in 1968?

A - Actually, about '67. Our first album came out in '68 titled "Down In L.A.". It was on A&M Records. That's how we got together. Tom and I were both folksingers, playing the coffee house circuit in the 60s, as solos. We both ended up in California. I had a partner before Tom and we had a band. We toured with The Byrds at the time "Eight Miles High" was their current single. The Buffalo Springfield formed in the house next door to me. In fact, that's where they got their name, off this machine right in front of my house. Anyway, Tom came to L.A. We knew each other from the Folk circuit. At this point my other partner and I had split up. I was a staff writer for one of A&M's publishing companies. Tom and I ended up co-writing a couple of tunes. I helped him get a job doing the same thing. We continued to write songs. We'd go in and demo them for the publishing company. It didn't take long for them or us to realize that we had sort of a sound and style of our own. That's how our first album came about.

Q - What did you call yourself on that Byrds tour?

A - Mastin and Brewer.

Q - Was that a nation-wide tour?

A - No. Just Southern California.

Q - So, when you signed a songwriting contract with A&M in 1965, that meant you wrote for other artists on the label?

A - Right.

Q - Who did you write for and how did you get that job?

A - Well, Mastin and I had a recording contract with Columbia. Just about the time we had a single ready to come out and we were going in to record an album, he just freaked. He couldn't take the pressure and he just split. The Buffalo Springfield and we were packing 'em in at the Whisky A Go Go. Mastin told me he met some girl and was moving in with her. He asked if I'd bring his amp to the gig, which I did and he just never showed. About three days later a mutual friend said "I just saw Tom in San Francisco." At least I knew which direction he headed. Our man at Columbia Records was leaving and going to this brand new record company just being formed by these two guys...Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. At that time A&M Records and their publishing company was literally an office with some filing cabinets. Then they went on to get the Perry Mason studios, which before that was the Charlie Chaplin studios, for their headquarters. He just kind of took me under his wing to A&M and I got the job as a staff writer.

Q - So, who did you write for?

A - Well, it's not like you specifically write songs for somebody. You just write songs. Maybe you could get somebody to cut 'em. I had tunes recorded by Glen Yarborough, Noel Harrison, Rex Harrison's son, and a group called HP Lovecraft. Then Tom and I had various songs recorded by various artists as well. Then we started doing our own. I've written songs since then that have been recorded by Stephen Stills, Don McLean, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Jonathan Edwards and various Bluegrass groups.

Q - When did you first arrive in L.A.? The mid-sixties?

A - Yeah. I originally was out there for several months the first time I was out there. Actually, I went to San Francisco and lived there for a year and moved to L.A. for about two or three more years. That's when Tom came out, when I was down in L.A.

Q - That had to have been an exciting time to have been in California. If you were in the Bay Area, did you see some of the hot up and coming bands of the day?

A - Oh gosh, yeah. There was a club called The Matrix. I used to see on the same bill at the club, The Jefferson Airplane before Grace Slick and The Grateful Dead and The Quicksilver Messenger Service and golly...the list just went on and on.

Q - How about Janis and Big Brother?

A - Yeah. I did see them, but that was after. That was later.

Q - Did you catch The Doors at The Whisky?

A - Oh, sure. And there was a club called The Troubadour that aside from the regular artists that did their shows there on Monday nights...it was Hootenanny night. Open mic night. You paid your dollar to get to play. If you didn't get a chance to play, you got your dollar back. On any given Monday night, it was everybody before they were famous from Linda Ronstadt to Jackson Browne. The first time I saw him he was 17 years old. You never knew who you were gonna see. You never knew who was gonna end up being famous.

Q - This first album of yours, "Down In L.A." was actually a demo of your songs?

A - Well, actually that was our first album. The songs were basically made up of demos. That's where most of these songs came from, songs that we had written for A&M. Basically, we were writing for ourselves. In fact, when I listen to our first three albums today, they're pretty cool little time capsules actually. We didn't intend for them to be at the time, but they are. They hold up.

Q - What I was trying to get at is, the album is not made up of actual demos you recorded, is it?

A - No. We went back in and recorded everything.

Q - So, that was wrong. You didn't get mad and move to a commercial farm outside of Kansas City and switch to Kama Sutra Records?

A - (laughs) I just love the press, don't you? It never ceases to crack me up how inaccurate they are. But, it's in print and if somebody didn't know any better, you take it as gospel.

Q - That's were I come in.

A - Exactly. It wasn't made up of demos. The songs were songs we wrote for A&M that we had demoed. That's what got us a deal. It wasn't working out at all with this guy Alan Stanton, who was the guy who brought me there in the first place. He was producing us, but it was different worlds. He was old school and we were definitely new school. And this is when artists were first starting to write their own songs, much less have any control over production. Up to that point, you just went into the studio and did what you were told. We were basically producing ourselves. It just wasn't' working out. We weren't getting what we were wanting. So, we ended up doing half the album at Leon Russell's home studio. That's when he was going by his real name, Russell Bridges. He played a bunch of keyboard on that album. Jimmy Messina played bass.

Q - When did you move to that communal farm?

A - We never did. (laughs) We left L.A. 'cause we named our album "Down In L.A.", if that gives you any idea of how we felt living out there. We just figured there had to be a better way to make music and hopefully earn your living without living in L.A. or San Francisco or Nashville or New York. So, we ended up in Kansas City. We didn't plan to move to K.C. One thing led to another and we just did. We did have a little farm outside of town and lived there for several years.

Q - How did Kama Sutra enter the picture?

A - Well, basically we got out of our deal with A&M because in those days the business couldn't relate to you if you didn't live in L.A., San Francisco, Nashville or New York. The fact that we'd gone back to the Heartland meant to them that we had quit the business. We formed a management, production company in Kansas City called Good Karma Productions. We ended up going East instead of West. I can't remember how Buddha / Kama Sutra ended up being the label we signed with. I know that Neil Bogart was the King of Bubblegum at the time. This is when FM music and album music was really happening. It wasn't just all about singles. We were definitely album artists. He wanted to get into that and shatter his King of Bubblegum image. So, we were one of the first album artists he signed.

Q - How well did you do at Kama Sutra Records?

A - We did well. We did five albums for Buddha.

Q - What happened when "One Toke Over The Line" hit?

A - Well, a lot of things happened. Well, basically we were living on the road at this point anyway, trying to establish our company in Kansas City. We played virtually every high school gymnasium and college in the entire heartland. Well, all over the country for that matter. We just kept on touring. We just started playing much bigger places and got paid a lot more. (laughs) That was the main thing that happened with "One Toke". And of course it was controversial. We wrote that song one night just entertaining ourselves in the dressing room of this little coffee house in Kansas City. Little did we know that it would end up being a Classic Rock hit, still played 25 - 30 years later, not to mention the fact that at the time it was the Nixon / Agnew administration. This was when the FCC was threatening radio stations with censoring lyrics. It was just ridiculous. In fact, Spiro Agnew name us personally on national TV one night as "subversives to American youth." (laughs) We loved it! We made Nixon's enemies list! It got us more publicity than we could have paid for. But, it was very controversial. At exactly the same time, and I swear this is true, and this is an example of how a song is what ever you interpret it to be, Lawrence Welk did "One Toke Over The Line". He introduced it as a Gospel song.

Q - On his TV show?

A - Yup.

Q - I won't ask you what you meant in that song...

A - Well, I wouldn't tell you anyway. I always told everybody it's whatever you want it to be.

Q - To me, it's just a catchy Pop song.

A - Right. To this day, so many people still think it's "One Tote Over The Line". (laughs) They don't even know what the word was. It is what you want it to be.

Q - How long did it take you to write that song?

A - It was a fast one. We basically wrote it entertaining ourselves one night. We were bored in the dressing room of a coffee house between shows.

Q - Where did you debut the song in concert?

A - We played Carnegie Hall, opening for Melanie and we got an encore and we were out of songs. We had just written that. So, we did that song. Everybody just went crazy. That's when Neil Bogart came backstage and said "you've got to record that song." And we did.

Q - What keeps you busy these days?

A - We started our own company. One Toke Productions and opened our website (BrewerAndShipley.com), started doing shows again and made our own CDs. We recorded one called "Shanghai" and one called "Heartland". Actually, we have a CDs worth of songs that are literally ten years old that we wrote back during the Persian Gulf War that we really need to get into the studio and record, because it would just be so timely right now.
http://www.classicbands.com/BrewerAn...Interview.html





Justices Let Stand Ruling on Illegal F.B.I. Search
David Stout

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that the F.B.I. went too far in searching the office of Representative William J. Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat accused of using his position to promote business deals in Africa.

Without comment, the justices declined to review a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which concluded last August that agents had violated the Constitution by the methods it used in the May 2006 search.

The appeals court did not find that the raid itself was unconstitutional; rather, it found that the F.B.I. violated constitutional separation of powers by allowing agents to look freely through Congressional files for incriminating evidence.

The ruling last August told the bureau to return legislative documents to Mr. Jefferson. It did not, however, affect other items seized from his office, including computer hard drives. Nor did it affect evidence seized in a separate raid on the Congressman’s Washington-area home, including $90,000 found wrapped in aluminum foil in frozen-food containers in his kitchen freezer.

The 18-hour search of Mr. Jefferson’s office on Capitol Hill marked the first time that the F.B.I. had searched a Congressional office, and it touched off a clash between the Bush administration and lawmakers of both parties. Mr. Jefferson has been indicted on charges of bribery, racketeering, conspiracy, money laundering and obstruction of justice. He has pleaded not guilty. The Justice Department said last August that the circuit court ruling would not affect the prosecution of Mr. Jefferson.

The ruling that the Supreme Court declined to review held that the F.B.I.’s use of a “filter team” to examine the evidence from the Congressman’s office to determine what was clearly legislative, and therefore out of bounds, was not adequate to protect Congress’s constitutional right to operate without interference from the executive branch.

At issue was Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution, the “speech or debate” clause intended to protect lawmakers from being hounded by the executive branch while carrying out their legislative duties.

Two former House speakers, Thomas S. Foley, a Democrat, and Newt Gingrich, a Republican, supported Mr. Jefferson’s challenge to the raid on his office. The present speaker, Nancy Pelosi, called last August’s ruling a reaffirmation of the separation of powers and the checks and balances the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Referring to President Bush’s former political adviser, Ms. Pelosi said, “The White House wouldn’t like it if we sent the Capitol Police over there to search Karl Rove’s desk.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/wa...scotus.html?hp





ACLU Accuses Military of Skirting the Law to Get Citizens' Internet, Banking, Phone Records
AP

The military is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans' Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, the ACLU said Tuesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union based its conclusion on a review of more than 1,000 documents turned over by the Defense Department after it sued the agency last year for documents related to national security letters. The lawsuit was filed in Manhattan federal court.

The letters are investigative tools used to compel businesses to turn over customer information without a judge's order or grand jury subpoena.

ACLU lawyer Melissa Goodman said the documents the civil rights group studied "make us incredibly concerned that the FBI and DoD might be collaborating to evade limits put on the DoD's use of NSLs."

It would be understandable if the military relied on help from the FBI on joint investigations, but not when the FBI was not involved in a probe, she said.

The FBI referred requests for comment Tuesday to the Defense Department. A request for comment from Justice Department lawyers for that agency was not immediately returned.

Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said the military is allowed to demand financial and credit records in certain instances but does not have the authority to get e-mail and phone records or lists of Web sites that people have visited. That is the kind of information that the FBI can get by using a national security letter, she said.

"That's why we're particularly concerned. The DoD may be accessing the kinds of records they are not allowed to get," she said.

Goodman also noted that legal limits are placed on the Defense Department "because the military doing domestic investigations tends to make us leery."

In other allegations, the ACLU said:

- The Navy's use of the letters to demand domestic records has increased significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks.

- The military wrongly claimed its use of the letters was limited to investigating only Defense Department employees.

- The Defense Department has not kept track of how many national security letters the military issues or what information it obtained through the orders.

- The military provided misleading information to Congress and silenced letter recipients from speaking out about the records requests.

Goodman said Congress should provide stricter guidelines and meaningful oversight of how the military and FBI make national security letter requests.

"Any government agency's ability to demand these kinds of personal, financial or Internet records in the United States is an intrusive surveillance power," she said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8772344





Behind the Scenes of Secret Surveillance and Its Public Unmasking
Jeffrey Rosen

BUSH’S LAW

The Remaking of American Justice

By Eric Lichtblau

349 pages. Pantheon. $26.95.

Eric Lichtblau is used to being cast as a hero or a villain for his reporting about the war on terror. This year Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, predicted that “some Americans are going to die” because of the public debate that resulted when Mr. Lichtblau and his New York Times colleague James Risen disclosed the existence of the Bush administration’s secret surveillance program; for the same articles Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Risen won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Now Mr. Lichtblau has produced a book about his experiences, “Bush’s Law.” It is a gripping account of Mr. Lichtblau’s efforts to expose various forms of secret surveillance and the Bush administration’s Nixonian efforts to retaliate against him and other critics: “All the President’s Men” for an age of terror. But this book offers much more than a journalist’s well-earned victory lap. Mr. Lichtblau also documents, with scrupulous detail, the broader costs of the Bush administration’s excesses for innocent victims and for the rule of law.

Mr. Lichtblau has especially memorable accounts of some of the 2,700 men locked up after 9/11 by American authorities; most of those men were never shown to have connections to terrorism.

There is Taj Bhatti, an elderly Pakistani doctor in Virginia whose house and computer discs were surreptitiously ransacked and who was secretly imprisoned in the county jail as a “material witness.” He was freed only after his son sent a press release to a local reporter; the federal magistrate who signed the arrest warrant (and prohibited Mr. Bhatti from talking about his imprisonment) then threatened the reporter with contempt.

There is Brandon Mayfield, the lawyer and former Army lieutenant from Kansas whose house was secretly searched and who was arrested after being linked to the Madrid bombings by an F.B.I. agent’s mistaken fingerprint match. (He got an apology and $2 million from the government.)

Mr. Lichtblau also describes the many innocent victims whose e-mail messages, phone calls and political activities were secretly surveilled. More than 180 peaceful groups opposed to the Iraq war ended up in the Pentagon’s Talon database, which was designed to collect leads that might be related to terrorism. (It included the names of people at antiwar rallies.) And by Mr. Lichtblau’s estimate “several thousand” people in the United States had their phone calls and e-mail messages secretly surveilled without warrants because of suspected ties to terrorism.

They included an Iranian-American doctor in Kentucky suspected of possibly helping Osama bin Laden with his kidney ailments simply because he was a nephrologist. Mr. Lichtblau identifies another possible victim: a teenage student at the Horace Mann School in New York who sent e-mail messages to India about parking spots in Manhattan, which led F.B.I. agents to show up at his door. (It turned out he wanted to rent the spots to out-of-towners.)

In addition to sweeping up innocent people in dragnets, the Bush administration, according to Mr. Lichtblau, was ruthless in retaliating against its critics, in and out of government. He describes the many government officials who committed “career suicide” by questioning President Bush’s policies, including James Ziglar, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who questioned sweeps and arrests in Muslim neighborhoods in Dearborn, Mich., and an F.B.I. whistle-blower who was frozen out of government after complaining about a bungled terrorism investigation and ended up working for the American Civil Liberties Union. After reporting about the F.B.I.’s interest in antiwar demonstrators, Mr. Lichtblau himself saw his press pass canceled by the Justice Department’s director of public affairs.

That was just a warm-up for the titanic battle to come, pitting President Bush and his top advisers against the editors of The Times, as the journalists decided whether to publish the article by Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Risen that disclosed the secret surveillance program. In a series of meetings that lasted 14 months, beginning weeks before the 2004 presidential elections, President Bush and 10 senior advisers made personal appeals to The Times not to run the article. In mid-December 2004 the editors initially decided not to run it because of concerns about national security.

But in the fall of 2005 Mr. Risen told the editors that he was thinking of including the story in his own forthcoming book, and they began to reconsider. It was now clear, Mr. Lichtblau writes, that the administration had lied to The Times in describing the scope of the program and in claiming that administration lawyers unanimously supported it. Mr. Lichtblau’s reporting revealed that there were deep divisions about the program’s legality at the highest levels of the administration. And when Mr. Lichtblau learned that administration officials had discussed seeking an injunction against The Times, just as President Richard M. Nixon had tried to enjoin the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Nixonian tactic helped seal The Times’s decision to publish the article and to post it first on the Web, so that the presses literally couldn’t be stopped.

Mr. Lichtblau argues that the administration’s national security arguments were overblown. The government had already pledged to eavesdrop on Al Qaeda, he notes. Therefore it wasn’t news to anyone that it was making good on the pledge; the news was that it was refusing to get court orders to do so, despite President Bush’s public claims to the contrary.

Nevertheless, Jack Goldsmith, the conservative lawyer who led an internal revolt in the Bush Justice Department against the original warrantless wiretapping program, which he believed may have been illegal, has said that he agreed with President Bush that the disclosure of the program did “great harm to the nation.” More discussion of what those harms might possibly have involved would have strengthened Mr. Lichtblau’s argument that they were ultimately outweighed by the public interest in disclosure.

The public benefits are now obvious. Thanks to the reporting by Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Risen we know that the president and his aides approved a secret eavesdropping program that many of his own top lawyers thought was illegal, lied about it to the press and the public and then attacked the journalists who disclosed it. Mr. Lichtblau also reveals that, because the program was on such shaky legal ground, administration officials feared it would taint other terrorist prosecutions. Far from disbanding the program after it was disclosed, as administration officials had initially threatened to do, they were forced instead to ask Congress to put it on sounder legal footing.

At a time when the press’s role in American democracy is being hotly contested, this book provides an inspiring example of reporters doing what they do best: checking claims of unlimited governmental power and protecting the public’s right to know.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/books/03rosen.html





New Bill May Speed U.S. Visas for Artists
Felicia R. Lee

When it comes to artists trying to obtain visas, notorious performers like Amy Winehouse usually get the headlines. That British soul singer’s application to come to the United States for the Grammy Awards in February was initially denied, with speculation that the refusal was because of her alleged use of illegal drugs.

But as the House of Representatives voted this week to speed up the visa approval process for some foreign artists and entertainers, the heads of arts organization said attention was finally being paid to the real problem: the time, money and complexity involved in getting visas for lower-profile artists, including dancers, singers, musicians and actors.

“It has become a huge burden,” said Nigel Redden, director of the Lincoln Center Festival, the renowned arts showcase that this summer will bring together 57 performances and events from nine countries.

“We hire someone in January whose only job is to do visas,” he said. Once, when the festival sought to bring in a cast of Chinese acrobats and soloists, a “visa wrangler” in China asked for $75,000 to smooth the way for the group to travel to the embassy and get the necessary papers in order.

“We’re turning the United States into fortress America,” Mr. Redden said. “It turns everyone into an enemy. It loses us friends around the world and respect around the world.”

Now, those seeking entry must run a bureaucratic gantlet that can include having to establish their artistic credentials, hire a lawyer, pay visa fees and visit a United States embassy or consulate.

All of that requires money and time, said Jonathan Ginsburg, an immigration lawyer in Fairfax, Va., with the firm of Fettmann, Tolchin & Majors. An entertainer from London who has an arrest record, for example, would need a report from Scotland Yard, which can cause more delays.

Once the application is made, the Homeland Security Department is supposed to act within two weeks, but recently it almost never has; in the worst cases, getting an answer takes as long as six months, arts organizations said. So-called premium processing is available to expedite an application, at a cost of $1,000 for each petitioner.

The House bill, approved on Tuesday, extends the processing time to 30 days from two weeks. If the deadline is not met, the department is required to provide free expedited processing. The bill, which applies only to visa applications made by nonprofit arts groups, still needs the Senate’s approval.

Heather Noonan, the vice president for advocacy for the League of American Orchestras, called the bill an important step.

“We’re very pleased to see Congress support opportunities for international cultural exchange this way and particularly happy to see such broad bipartisan support for the measure,” Ms. Noonan said.

Sandra Gibson, the president and chief executive of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, said: “We’ve been watching this issue for 10 years. The premium-processing fee meant the nonprofit community would not be served.”

A task force on visas was formed in 2001, she said, when premium processing began. But the Sept. 11 attacks slowed everything down. “There were delays in interviews, inability to get interviews,” Ms. Gibson said. On applications, problems like inverted birth dates and misspelled last names made problems snowball. Around the world, the embassies and consulates that were part of the process were staffed at different levels. “In China and India it can take 100 days to get an interview,” she said.

With the value of the dollar waning, more and more artists have decided to stay home, Ms. Gibson said, echoing other officials. And fewer of the presenters, she said, are willing to go through the contortions of bringing in foreign artists.

Cyril M. Ferenchak, a spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department, said in an e-mail message that the government had worked hard to make the visa application easier and more efficient.

“Over 570 new consular positions have been created to handle a growing visa demand and the added security measure in our visa adjudication process,” Mr. Ferenchak wrote, adding that embassy Web sites provide information on things like required documents to demystify the visa process.

Matthew Covey, executive director of Tamizdat, a nonprofit group that helps artists get visas, said the House bill was a step in the right direction. Emerging artists without much money or the organizational skills to get together a visa application are the ones especially hurt by the visa labyrinth.

“An awful lot of musicians don’t make a lot of money,” he said. “They are looking to break even, to promote their work. Most musicians need to expedite their visas because many clubs book six to eight weeks in advance.”

And American audiences may never know what they are missing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/arts/03visa.html





U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks 'Abortion'
Sarah Lai Stirland

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It's funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like "Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births," and "Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005."

But on Thursday, a search on "abortion" was producing only the message "No records found by latest query."

Stephen Goldstein, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins, said he wasn't aware of the censorship, and couldn't immediately comment.

Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that "actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations."

A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.

Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins' Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

"We recently made all abortion terms stop words," Dickson wrote in a note to Gloria Won, the UCSF medical center librarian making the inquiry. "As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

There was no notice of the change on the site.

Dickson suggested other kinds of more obscure search strategies and alternative words to get around the keyword blocking.

"In addition to the terms you're already using, you could try using 'Fertility Control, Postconception'. This is the broader term to our 'abortion' terms and most records have both in the keyword fields," she wrote.

She also suggested using a euphemistic search strategy of "unwanted w/2 pregnancy." But the workarounds don't satisfy critics of the censorship.

"The main function of their site is keyword search, and if you use a phrase that contains the word 'abortion,' it ignores it," notes Melissa Just, the library director at the cancer research institute and hospital named City of Hope in Duarte, California. Just followed the conversation on a listserv and said she was outraged when she found out about the censorship incident.

"Even if you were trying to make an argument to someone that abortion is a bad idea for them -- whether it's a health risk, or you're concerned about their mental well being, you wouldn't be able to find articles about your claim," she notes. "It's shutting off both the pro and the con access."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...rnment-fu.html





Freenet 0.7.0 Release Candidate 1 Released

Freenet version 0.7 Release Candidate 1 is now available for public testing.

Freenet is a global peer-to-peer network designed to allow users to publish and consume information without fear of censorship. To use it, you must download the Freenet software, available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other operating systems. Once you install and run Freenet, your computer will join a global, decentralized P2P network. You will be able to publish and consume information anonymously, either through your web browser, or through a variety of third party applications.

Freenet 0.7 is a ground-up rewrite of Freenet. The key user-facing feature in Freenet 0.7 is the ability to operate Freenet in a "darknet" mode, where your Freenet node will only talk to other Freenet users that you trust. This makes it much more difficult for an adversary to discover that you are using Freenet, let alone what you are doing with it. 0.7 also includes significant improvements to both security and performance.

Freenet 0.7 RC1 can be downloaded from:

http://freenetproject.org/download.html

This release would not have been possible without the release of numerous volunteers, and Matthew Toseland, Freenet's full time developer. Matthew's work is funded through donations via our website (as well as a few larger sponsors from time to time). We ask that anyone who can help us to ensure Matthew's continued employment visit our donations page and make a contribution at:

http://freenetproject.org/donate.html

The Freenet Project is also participating in the Google Summer of Code project this year, if you are interested in joining, please see the Summer of Code site as soon as possible:

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/

17th Mar, 2008 - Freenet accepted into Google Summer of Code 2008

Google has accepted us into their Summer of Code for the third year. The last two years have been a mixed bag, but some good code has come out of it (not least Thaw), and some good developers too. This year we will be doing fewer projects than last year because we only have two confirmed mentors, and we will be selecting candidates more carefully. If you want to get paid $4,500 by Google to work on Freenet over the summer, please have a look at the wiki page (including ideas list, although feel free to suggest a proposal that isn't there) and contact us.
http://freenetproject.org/news.html





Linux Declared 'Hacker Proof'
Jupiter Kalambakal

The Linux running on a Sony Vaio remained undefeated at the end of a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference.

Sponsors had wagered three laptops to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A $20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal.

The MacBook Air went first; Independent Security Evaluators' Charlie Miller took the Mac after about two minutes work on Thursday. Miller took home $10,000, courtesy of 3Com's TippingPoint division, in addition to the new laptop.

After two days of work, Shane Macaulay finally cracked the tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista on Friday, with a little help from his friends.

Macaulay said the flaw he exploited was a cross-platform bug that took advantage of Java to circumvent Vista's security. Macaulay said he chose to work on Vista because he had done contract work for Microsoft in the past and was more familiar with its products.

TippingPoint Manager Terri Forslof said several attendees tried to crack the Linux box, but nobody could pull it off. She noted that some had found bugs in the Linux operating system but many of them didn't want to put the work into developing the exploit code that would be required to win the contest.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7010483023





Inside the Black Budget
William J. Broad

Skulls. Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Grim reapers. Snakes. Swords. Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. Moons. Stars. A dragon holding the Earth in its claws.

No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy.

It is, according to a new book, part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon’s classified, or “black,” budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy armies of high-tech warriors. The book offers a glimpse of this dark world through a revealing lens — patches — the kind worn on military uniforms.

“It’s a fresh approach to secret government,” Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said in an interview. “It shows that these secret programs have their own culture, vocabulary and even sense of humor.”

One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. “To Serve Man” reads the text above, a reference to a classic “Twilight Zone” episode in which man is the entree, not the customer. “Gustatus Similis Pullus” reads the caption below, dog Latin for “Tastes Like Chicken.”

Military officials and experts said the patches are real if often unofficial efforts at building team spirit.

The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion. That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of warfare. In the past, such handiwork has produced some of the most advanced jets, weapons and spy satellites, as well as notorious boondoggles.

Budget documents tell little. This year, for instance, the Pentagon says Program Element 0603891c is receiving $196 million but will disclose nothing about what the project does. Private analysts say it apparently aims at developing space weapons.

Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reveal a bizarre mix of high and low culture where Latin and Greek mottos frame images of spooky demons and sexy warriors, of dragons dropping bombs and skunks firing laser beams.

“Oderint Dum Metuant,” reads a patch for an Air Force program that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence, according to Mr. Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates “Let them hate so long as they fear.”

Wizards appear on several patches. The one hurling lightning bolts comes from a secret Air Force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas in a secluded valley. Mr. Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separate star as a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced aircraft and, U.F.O. buffs say, captured alien spaceships.

The book offers not only clues into the nature of the secret programs, but also a glimpse of zealous male bonding among the presumed elite of the military-industrial complex. The patches often feel like fraternity pranks gone ballistic.

The book’s title? “I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me,” published by Melville House. Mr. Paglen says the title is the Latin translation of a patch designed for the Navy Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 4, at Point Mugu, Calif. Its mission, he says, is to test strike aircraft, conventional weapons and electronic warfare equipment and to develop tactics to use the high-tech armaments in war.

“The military has patches for almost everything it does,” Mr. Paglen writes in the introduction. “Including, curiously, for programs, units and activities that are officially secret.”

He said contractors in some cases made the patches to build esprit de corps. Other times, he added, military units produced them informally, in contrast to official patches.

Mr. Paglen said he found them by touring bases, noting what personnel wore, joining alumni associations, interviewing active and former team members, talking to base historians and filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

A spokesman for the Pentagon, Cmdr. Bob Mehal, said it would be imprudent to comment on “which patches do or do not represent classified units.” In an e-mail message, Commander Mehal added, “It would be supposition to suggest ‘anyone’ is uncomfortable with this book.”

Each year, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a private group in Washington, publishes an update on the Pentagon’s classified budget. It says the money began to soar after the two events of Mr. Bush’s coming into office and terrorists’ 9/11 attacks.

What sparked his interest, Mr. Paglen recalled, were Vice President Dick Cheney’s remarks as the Pentagon and World Trade Center smoldered. On “Meet the Press,” he said the nation would engage its “dark side” to find the attackers and justice. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows,” Mr. Cheney said. “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

In an interview, Mr. Paglen said that remark revived memories of his childhood when his military family traveled the globe to bases often involved in secret missions. “I’d go out drinking with Special Forces guys,” he recalled. “I was 15, and they were 20, and they could never say where they where coming from or what they were doing. You were just around the stuff.”

Intrigued by Mr. Cheney’s remarks as well as his own recollections, Mr. Paglen set off to map the secret world and document its expansion. He traveled widely across the Southwest, where the military keeps many secret bases. His labors, he said, resulted in his Ph.D. thesis as well as a book, “Blank Spots on a Map,” that Dutton plans to publish next year.

The research also led to another book, “Torture Taxi,” that Melville House published in 2006. It described how spies kidnapped and detained suspected terrorists around the globe.

“Black World,” a 2006 display of his photographs at Bellwether, a gallery in Chelsea, showed “anonymous-looking buildings in parched landscapes shot through a shimmering heat haze,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times, adding that the images “seem to emit a buzz of mystery as they turn military surveillance inside out: here the surveillant is surveilled.”

In this research, Mr. Paglen became fascinated by the patches and started collecting them and displaying them at talks and shows. He said a breakthrough occurred around 2004, when he visited Peter Merlin, an “aerospace archaeologist” who works in the Mojave Desert not far from a sprawling military base. Mr. Merlin argued that the lightning bolts, stars and other symbols could be substantive clues about unit numbers and operating locations, as well as the purpose of hidden programs.

“These symbols,” Mr. Paglen wrote, “were a language. If you could begin to learn its grammar, you could get a glimpse into the secret world itself.”

His book explores this idea and seeks to decode the symbols. Many patches show the Greek letter sigma, which Mr. Paglen identifies as a technical term for how well an object reflects radar waves, a crucial parameter in developing stealthy jets.

A patch from a Groom Lake unit shows the letter sigma with the “buster” slash running through it, as in the movie “Ghost Busters.” “Huge Deposit — No Return” reads its caption. Huge Deposit, Mr. Paglen writes, “indicates the bomb load deposited by the bomber on its target, while ‘No Return’ refers to the absence of a radar return, meaning the aircraft was undetectable to radar.”

In an interview, Mr. Paglen said his favorite patch was the dragon holding the Earth in its claws, its wings made of American flags and its mouth wide open, baring its fangs. He said it came from the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees developing spy satellites. “There’s something both belligerent and weirdly self-critical about it,” he remarked. “It’s representing the U.S. as a dragon with the whole world in its clutches.”

The field is expanding. Dwayne A. Day and Roger Guillemette, military historians, wrote an article published this year in The Space Review (www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1) on patches from secret space programs. “It’s neat stuff,” Dr. Day said in an interview. “They’re not really giving away secrets. But the patches do go farther than the organizations want to go officially.”

Mr. Paglen plans to keep mining the patches and the field of clandestine military activity. “It’s kind of remarkable,” he said. “This stuff is a huge industry, I mean a huge industry. And it’s remarkable that you can develop these projects on an industrial scale, and we don’t know what they are. It’s an astounding feat of social engineering.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/sc...patc.html?8dpc





Jules Dassin, Filmmaker on Blacklist, Dies at 96
Richard Severo

Jules Dassin, an American director, screenwriter and actor who found success making movies in Europe after he was blacklisted in the United States because of his earlier ties to the Communist Party, died Monday in Athens, where he had lived since the 1970s. He was 96.

A spokeswoman for Hygeia Hospital confirmed his death but did not give a cause, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Dassin is most widely remembered for films he made after he fled Hollywood in the 1950s, including “Never on Sunday” (1960), with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he later married; “Topkapi” (1964), with Ms. Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and Maximilian Schell; and the 1954 French thriller “Rififi.”

But before his blacklisting he had also carved out a successful Hollywood career making noir movies like “Brute Force” (1947), a prison drama starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn; “The Naked City” (1948), an influential New York City police yarn that won Academy Awards for cinematography and editing; and “Thieves’ Highway” (1949), about criminals who try to coerce truckers in California.

Mr. Dassin’s last major effort before his exile was “Night and the City” (1950), a film shot in London starring Richard Widmark (who died last Monday) as a shady but naïve wrestling promoter and Francis L. Sullivan as a predatory nightclub owner. Some critics called it Mr. Dassin’s masterpiece.

“Dassin turned Londontown into a city of busted dreams and nightmare alleys,” Michael Sragow wrote on salon.com in 2000. “He mixed the fantastic and the real with masterly ease.”

The producer Darryl F. Zanuck had assigned the film to Mr. Dassin just as Mr. Dassin was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He never did testify, but testimony by the directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle, who recalled Mr. Dassin’s Communist Party membership in the 1930s, was damning enough to sink his career.

Mr. Dassin left the United States for France in 1953 because, he said, he was “unemployable” in Hollywood. In Paris, unable to speak much more than restaurant French when he arrived, he encountered hard times and remained largely unemployed for five years. In need of money, he agreed to direct “Rififi,” a low-budget production about a jewelry heist. A memorable sequence is of the robbery itself, lasting about a half-hour and filmed without music or dialogue.

Mr. Dassin also acted in the movie, under the name Perlo Vita, playing an Italian safe expert. He won a best-director award for the film at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. By the time he wrote and directed “Never on Sunday,” a comedy about a good-hearted prostitute (Ms. Mercouri), the anti-Communist witch hunt in the United States had been discredited, and he had been accepted again.

Mr. Dassin also had a role in the movie, as a bookish American from — like Mr. Dassin himself — Middletown, Conn., who tries to reform the prostitute. His directing and screenwriting were nominated for Academy Awards.

The movie was a moneymaker and its title song was a hit, though some critics found the script predictable. Ms. Mercouri became Mr. Dassin’s second wife in 1966, two years after he directed her in “Topkapi,” another film about jewel thieves, the prize in this case being gems from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.

Jules Dassin was born in Middletown on Dec. 18, 1911, one of eight children of Samuel Dassin, an immigrant barber from Russia, and the former Berthe Vogel. Shortly after Jules was born, his father moved the family to Harlem. Jules attended Morris High School in the Bronx.

He joined the Communist Party in 1930s, a decision he recalled in 2002 in an interview with The Guardian in London. “You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant,” he told the newspaper. “You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it’s a very natural process.”

He left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.

In the mid-1930s, Mr. Dassin studied drama in Europe before returning to New York, where he made his debut as an actor in the Yiddish Theater. He also wrote radio scripts.

He went to Hollywood shortly before World War II erupted in Europe and was hired as an apprentice to the directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. Soon he was directing films for MGM, including “Reunion in France,” a Joan Crawford vehicle with John Wayne in which her character comes to believe that her fiancé is a Nazi collaborator.

His later movies were often joint efforts with Ms. Mercouri. They included “He Who Must Die” (1957), about life overtaking a Passion play in a village on Crete; and “La Legge” (1959), a noirish melodrama with Gina Lollobrigida, Marcello Mastroianni and Yves Montand.

One film without Ms. Mercouri was “Up Tight!” (1968), a remake of a John Ford classic, “The Informer,” set in a poor black neighborhood, with a script by its star, Ruby Dee. It was Mr. Dassin’s first film in the United States since he had left.

The year before, Mr. Dassin had directed the Broadway musical comedy “Ilya Darling,” based on “Never on Sunday,” for which Ms. Mercouri won a Tony Award. The couple lived in Manhattan during the run.

The same year, 1967, Ms. Mercouri, an ardent anti-Facist, lost her Greek citizenship for engaging in what Greece’s rightist government called “anti-national activities.” In 1970, Mr. Dassin was accused of sponsoring a plot to overthrow the junta. The charges were later dropped.

When the regime lost power in 1974, he and Ms. Mercouri returned from exile, which had been spent mainly in Paris. Ms. Mercouri entered politics, becoming a member of Parliament and later culture minister. They had homes in Athens and on the Greek island of Spetsai. Ms. Mercouri died in 1994. They had no children.

Mr. Dassin’s first marriage, to Beatrice Launer, from 1933 to 1962, ended in divorce. Their son, Joseph, who became a popular French singer, died in 1980. Mr. Dassin is survived by two other children from his first marriage, Richelle and Julie Dassin, an actress, as well as grandchildren.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Dassin ran the Melina Mercouri Foundation, which tried to induce the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, sculptures taken from the Parthenon nearly 200 years ago. In September, a museum is set to open at the foot of the Acropolis displaying plaster casts of the works.

Mr. Dassin ended his directing career in his late 60s on a disheartened note, when his film “Circle of Two” (1980) — about an aging artist (Richard Burton) who is infatuated with a teenage student (Tatum O’Neal) — did poorly at the box office. Mr. Dassin never made another film.

He had always been demanding of himself and often critical of his own work. In 1962, with his best films largely behind him, Mr. Dassin told Cue magazine: “Of my own films, there’s only one I’ve really liked — ‘He Who Must Die.’ That is, I like what it had to say. But that doesn’t mean I’m completely satisfied with it. I’d do it all over again, if I could.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/movies/01dassin.html





An Online Game So Mysterious Its Famous Sponsor Is Hidden
Stephanie Clifford

NOT known for its dark marketing, McDonald’s is more a try-our-new-salad, get-your-Shrek-action-figure, look-at-our-dollar-menu sort of place.

For that reason, gamers were surprised to learn that McDonald’s was the sponsor of an enigmatic Olympic-themed online game called The Lost Ring, introduced last month. Nothing about the game was branded McDonald’s, and the game’s Web sites — mysterious and hip, like “Lost” mixed with “The Blair Witch Project”— were a far cry from the golden arches.

“The Olympics in Beijing are a very big event for us, and we have a lot of different types of activation, with The Lost Ring being the most creative,” said Mary Dillon, McDonald’s global chief marketing officer. “Our goal is really about strengthening our bond with the global youth culture.”

The Lost Ring is part of a gaming genre called alternate-reality games that blend online and offline clues and rely on players collaborating to solve the puzzles.

While corporate sponsorship of these games is common — a popular one called The Beast was created by Microsoft for the Warner Brothers film “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” — this is McDonald’s first foray into the genre.

The game began with 50 bloggers receiving packages with an Olympic-themed poster and a clue pointing them to TheLostRing.com. The site presented a dramatic trailer, replete with sci-fi lighting and a narrator with a British-accented baritone speaking over scenes of a woman waking up in a field with “Trovu la ringon perditan” — an Esperanto phrase — tattooed on her arm.



Within a day or two, as players searched for clues, they found the terms of service on the Web site, which revealed that McDonald’s, in partnership with the International Olympic Committee, was behind the game.

“I think finding out that it was McDonald’s was kind of a big shock for everyone,” said Geoff May, a player in Ontario who founded a Web site (olympics.wikibruce.com) on the game. “Obviously it’s McDonald’s, and not everyone likes them,” he said. “Personally, I don’t mind as long as we don’t get products forced down our throat. If we’re getting McDonald’s meals sold by characters, it’s going to be hard to suspend our disbelief.”

That’s part of the reason McDonald’s has remained behind the curtain thus far. A successful alternate-reality game relies on the players’ continuing interest.

“If an A.R.G. is too clearly corporate or commercial, the gamers will not want to engage,” said Tracy Tuten, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, who studies new-media marketing tools. “It’s very important that the game be written in a way where the branding is not obvious.”

McDonald’s has been careful to reflect that, Ms. Dillon said. “Above all, we want to be credible, authentic and respectful to this new audience,” she said.

With that in mind, development of the game was given to AKQA, a San Francisco marketing agency, and Jane McGonigal, a game developer.

When released in early March, the game was available in seven languages. Ten characters provide clues via YouTube videos, blogs, Flickr photos and Twitter updates. Online clues are supplemented by offline ones: last week, players found documents in a Tokyo mailbox and a bookstore fireplace in Johannesburg.

The clues have helped players deduce the outline of the game, which centers on a lost Olympic sport that one plays blindfolded. Soon, Ms. McGonigal said, players will be asked to participate in the sport in the real world.

The game is scheduled to run through Aug. 24, the Olympics closing ceremony. “I think the players will be very happy to discover that around the closing ceremonies, there is a real-world payoff to their alternate-reality heroics,” Ms. McGonigal said. She was, in keeping with the game’s spirit, cryptic about what that payoff would be, though she hinted that the city of Beijing might be involved.



McDonald’s would not disclose the cost of the campaign, though Ms. Dillon said that “in the context of the total Olympics, it’s just a fraction of what we’re doing.” As for measuring the return on the company’s investment, Ms. Dillon said she saw it as more of a learning experience. “You can’t put an R.O.I. on this,” she said.

McDonald’s said the game had attracted 150,000 players so far, with 70 percent of traffic from outside the United States.

Both the quiet sponsorship and the game itself are unusual for McDonald’s. But the company does aim for the youth market, which overlaps neatly with the fan base for alternate-reality games. If those gamers develop new respect for McDonald’s, it would be a marketing coup.

“The players appreciate that they got this good experience for free,” said Sean C. Stacey, the founder of the gaming fan site Unfiction. “That tends to create a stronger bond between the player and the brand than having a straight advertisement.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/bu...ia/01adco.html





Now on the Endangered Species List: Movie Critics in Print
David Carr

The continual drumbeat of news that film critics are being laid off at daily and weekly newspapers across the country has kicked up some quotable reviews.

“A dire situation!” Scott Rudin, independent film producer.

“A terrible loss!” Tom Bernard, Sony Pictures Classics.

“Puts serious movies at risk!” Mark Urman, ThinkFilm.

Those men were not actually speaking in exclamation points — the blurb genre engenders a certain license — but they were upset by the departures of movie critics. Nathan Lee, one of The Village Voice’s two full-time critics, was laid off last week by Village Voice Media, a large chain of alternative weeklies that has been cutting down the number of critics it employs across the country.

The week before, two longtime critics at Newsday — Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour — took buyouts, along with their editor. And at Newsweek, David Ansen is among 111 staff members taking buyouts, according to a report in Radar.

They join critics at more than a dozen daily newspapers (including those in Denver, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale) and several alternative weeklies who have been laid off, reassigned or bought out in the past few years, deemed expendable at a time when revenues at print publications are declining, under pressure from Web alternatives and a growing recession in media spending.

Given that movie blogs are strewn about the Web like popcorn on a theater floor, there are those who say that movie criticism is not going away, it’s just appearing on a different platform. And no one would argue that fewer critics and the adjectives they hurl would imperil the opening of “Iron Man” in May. But for a certain kind of movie, critical accolades can mean the difference between relevance and obscurity, not to mention box office success or failure.

“For those of us who are making work that requires a kind of intellectual conversation, we rely on that talk to do the work of getting people interested,” said Mr. Rudin, who produced “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood,” two Oscar-nominated and critically championed films last year. “All of the talk about ‘No Country,’ all of the argument about the ending, kept that film in the forefront of the conversation” and helped it win the best picture Oscar.

Despite Samuel Butler’s long ago suggestion that critics arrive at their occupation because of their general unfitness for anything else, they can be a cultural good, championing films that lack crowd-pleasing content or the financial wherewithal to muscle their way into public consciousness. Mr. Lee, for example, named “Southland Tales” the best film of last year. Never heard of the postnuclear, semi-futuristic portrait of Los Angeles directed by Richard Kelly (“Donnie Darko”)? That’s very much the point. “Criticism is treated as a kind of product, and that is inevitably going to favor bigger national releases,” said Owen Gleiberman, a critic at Entertainment Weekly. “That The Village Voice doesn’t want to pay for two staff movie critics is a joke,” he added. “There is so much to cover.”

Michael Lacey, executive editor of Village Voice Media, said in an e-mail message that the company, which owns 17 newspapers, continues to have a serious commitment to covering film.

“Whether a recession or a depression, papers are making decisions based upon the economy, clearly, but our coverage of film remains strong despite the departure of the smart and acerbic Nathan Lee,” he wrote. “When we took over The Village Voice we had essentially one full time writer covering film, Jim Hoberman. He is still with us. We will expand the work of talented New York freelance critics to insure local coverage of the scene specific to Manhattan.” (Mr. Lee, who has been a freelance writer for The New York Times, declined to comment when contacted.)

Mr. Lacey added that the chain still has five full-time film critics and that worrying about whether each city had its own critic seemed silly at a time when major metropolitan dailies can’t afford to cover the presidential race. (The loss of a critic in New York, where some films see their only light of day, would seem to be more problematic.)

Mr. Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics, whose current movies include “The Band’s Visit,” “Married Life” and “The Counterfeiters,” suggested that losing some local critical firepower is troubling for both readers and distributors.

“In each city there is a mosaic of voices,” he said, “with each reflecting the personality of the town and the readership. For us a movie like ‘The Lives of Others,’ ” — the German-language winner of the 2006 foreign film Oscar — “was dragged along by critics until people realized that it was one of the best movies of the year.”

But are print critics really so all-important and sacrosanct with the Web full of debates about all manner of film in places like indiewire.com, cinematical.com and blog.spout.com?

“Honestly, I think that a lot of the viewers of serious films have already migrated to the Web,” said S. T. VanAirsdale, a senior editor at defamer.com and the founder of thereeler.com, a site devoted to coverage of the New York film world. “Serious movies can always be helped by a boost from anywhere, but almost anyone who is interested can find plenty of information about a film before it even opens because of all the coverage in the blogs about festivals and screenings.”

And David Poland, head of the Movie City News Web site (moviecitynews.com), said he likes reading serious printed criticism as much as the next movie fanatic, but films intended for adults have far bigger problems — namely, too many movies on too few screens — than the number of people teasing them apart. “Losing critics for serious film is like taking away the padding on the crutches of a very sick man with two broken legs and one working eye,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “It’s not going to keep it from limping along, but yeah, it hurts like hell.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/movies/01crit.html





Why not

How to Hack an Airwick Battery-Operated Air Freshener

Yeah, you read that right. Lame, huh? I mean, lame that you'd even have to.

See, a while back, the air freshener companies made these neat little pressurized cartridge things that you could press to release a puff of something flowery to cover the unholy reek every time you poop:

But in their infinite wisdom, they seem to have discontinued these. I imagine the board-room discussion went something like this:

"People like this product, but we think they're not pooping enough because we're not selling enough refill cartridges."

"I have an idea! Let's switch to a battery-operated design so that we can AUTOMATICALLY freshen the air every few minutes! Even when nobody's around to smell it! Even when nobody's pooping!"

"Brilliant Jenkins! And let's give them no way to turn that off so that a cartridge goes dead in 2 weeks, and so do the 3 AA batteries inside!"

"Splendid thinking, Farnsworth!"

So they did. And the AirWick Battery-Operated Air Freshener with patented Money-Waster(tm) technology was born. And they pulled all the manual models from the market:

So here we are, finding a need to do something nobody in history has ever needed to do before: Hack the air freshener so it doesn't automatically puff constantly, wasting money.

Step-by-Step

Remove the batteries
Remove the 2 screws holding the package together (One is inside the battery compartment).
Use a regular screwdriver to pry the package open. This will take some effort as it's quite well built. Be careful:

Remove the 2 screws holding the control board in place.

Here's the board. There's a control chip underneath the black epoxy bump. In the middle of the board, above the alligator clip holding it, there's 4 solder pads arranged in a square. Those are the contacts for the spray button:

Cut traces where the two red lines are shown. A small file works well for this. This will lobotomize the automated functions and remove all power from the rest of the circuit so that it doesn't waste electricity. 5 traces will be cut in total:

Solder 2 wires as shown. One is going from the battery's ground to one side of the pushbutton, and the other is going from the pushbutton to the control lead of the solenoid's power transistor:

Here's the board with all the changes made:

screw the control board back into the case:

Snap the case closed again. You can put the screws holding it together back if you want, or if your prying-open efforts damaged the tabs too much for it to hold itself together well.

And that's it! Now the air freshener will only spritz when you want it to, not when AirWick corporation wants it to. (As a side, note, the device will now keep spraying for as long as you have the button down, instead of a quick spritz)

Fuck you, AirWick corporation.
http://triggur.org/airwick/





Record Companies Sue Pirate Bay Four

Record companies are demanding that the four individuals responsible for operating the file sharing site The Pirate Bay pay €1.6 million (15 million kronor/$2.5 million) in compensatory damages.

"The record companies can go screw themselves," said Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg to The Local.

The compensation claim was presented to Stockholm District Court on Monday.

In addition to Svartholm Warg, fellow Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström have been indicted for being accessories to breaking copyright law.

The indictment covers 24 music albums, nine films, and four computer games.

"As usual, we're not too concerned," said Svartholm Warg of the new demand for damages.

He's already been in touch with the others accused in the case, all of whom found the claim rather amusing.

"We mostly laughed at it," he said.

In calculating the damages claim, record companies counted the number times the 24 albums were illegally downloaded, according to a preliminary investigation. On top of that, the companies are demanding general compensation because the copyright owners didn’t give permission for the downloading.

“This damages now being demanded are based on the albums which the prosecutor has included in his indictment. The injury to the record companies, the artists, and the copyright holders caused by The Pirate Bay’s illegal activity is many times greater,” said Lars Gustafsson, head of the Swedish chapter of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (Ifpi).

But Svartholm Warg didn't have much faith in the record companies' calculations, which he claimed were based on multiplying the retail price for the album by the number of times it was downloaded.

"Their numbers are pure fantasy," he said.

Svartholm Warg was also flummoxed as to why the record companies announced the damages claim at this stage of the case.

"It doesn't appear if the record companies have much of a strategy at all," he said.

The four accused in the record company suit were indicted in January on criminal charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law. A trial date is still pending.
http://www.thelocal.se/10818/20080331/





Lee Abrams To Exit XM, Join Tribune Co.
FMQB

XM Satellite Radio's chief creative officer, Lee Abrams, resigned from the company today in order to accept a position as Chief Innovation Officer for Tribune Company. He will begin his new job on April 1.

"It is with mixed emotions that I announce to the company that Lee Abrams has resigned," wrote EVP of Programming Eric Logan in a letter to employees. "Lee's impact on XM and the entire satellite radio industry would be impossible to capture in an e-mail. However, everyone in our company knows that Lee's vision and creative force is a key reason why XM is as successful as we are today. Lee's mark on our medium will be remembered forever and we are grateful to have had Lee as one of our founding programmers and architect of our programming philosophy."

In his new position, Abrams will be responsible for innovation across Tribune's publishing, broadcasting and interactive divisions. "There is a remarkable opportunity for Tribune to design the future of American media with passion, intellect, and imagination that meets the spirit of the 21st century," he commented. "We have the resources to pioneer a new age of information and entertainment that re-invents and enlightens-and that is exactly what we are going to do!"

"Lee is the most formidable creative thinker in the media business today," added Randy Michaels, Tribune's President of broadcasting and interactive. "He invented the modern FM radio format, got satellite radio off the ground when no one gave it a chance, and managed to advise on the redesign of Rolling Stone magazine and the launch of TNT Cable Network in his spare time. Lee's going to pump new life into our content, re-energize our brands, and get people thinking and working together like they never have before."
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=614773





F.C.C. Chairman Rejects Skype Petition
Peter Svensson

The Federal Communications Commission should reject a petition by eBay Inc.'s Skype division to require wireless operators to allow any device on their networks, the agency's chairman said Tuesday.

To applause, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told an audience at the CTIA Wireless trade show that the industry's recent push toward openness makes such a rule unnecessary.

Skype, which provides free voice calls and videoconferencing over Internet connections, asked the commission in February 2007 to apply the 1968 Carterfone decision to wireless networks. The decision opened AT&T's wireline network to phones not made by the monopoly phone company.

Martin cited Verizon Wireless' decision to open its network to any device or application by the end of this year, and the participation by T-Mobile USA and Sprint Nextel Corp. in Google Inc.'s Open Handset Alliance, which is developing new software for phones.

''In light of the industry's embrace of this more open approach, I think it's premature for the commission to place any other requirements on these networks,'' Martin said. ''Today I'm going to circulate to my fellow commissioners an order dismissing the petition by Skype that would apply Carterfone requirements to existing wireless networks.''

EBay said it was disappointed in Martin's statement.

Recent industry changes were positive, but incomplete, the company said Tuesday. The petition was meant to protect consumers' rights ''to use any application and any device on a wireless network,'' eBay said in a statement.

''While we are cautiously optimistic that the carriers will deliver greater openness, unfortunately, if the FCC acts on the chairman's recommendation, it will have given up the tools to protect consumers if they do not,'' said Christopher Libertelli, a director of government affairs for Skype.

Martin's order would need the support of two other commissioners to take effect, support that's likely to come from the two Republican appointees.

Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps criticized the chairman's move.

''This is not the time for the FCC to declare victory and withdraw from the fight for open wireless networks,'' Copps said in a statement. ''While we are all encouraged by preliminary commitments from some of the major carriers, we haven't seen the details yet on how they are going to proceed -- and the devil is always in the details, isn't it?''

The FCC did apply open-access requirements to a segment of the 700 megahertz spectrum it recently auctioned for a total of $19.6 billion. Verizon Wireless bought most of the airwaves set off for open access.
http://www.examiner.com/a-1314179~FC..._Petition.html





Military Report: Secretly 'Recruit or Hire Bloggers'
Noah Shachtman

A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers."

Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.

Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic exercise. "The comments are not 'actionable', merely thought provoking," he tells Danger Room. "The views expressed in the article publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations Command], or the Joint Special Operations University."

Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, "I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don't know if it led to anything."

The report introduces the military audience to the "blogging phenomenon," and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces -- specifically, the military's public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units -- might use the sites to their advantage.

Quote:
Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.
Denning, the report's author, has promoted controversial opinions before. In the early 1990s, when she was chair of the Georgetown University's computer science department, Denning emerged as the leading advocate for the so-called "Clipper Chip," a cryptographic device for protecting communications -- until the government wanted to listen in. The project was cancelled by 1996.

In her 2006 paper, Denning warns that blogs can and will be used by America's enemies. These sites, she argues, can also be used to serve U.S. government interests.

Quote:
There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action, give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty in exchange for information. (emphasis mine)
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/0...t-recruit.html





Is Peer-To-Peer Downloading Just Digital Gluttony?
Adam McDowell

On a message board for the group People With An Absurdly Large Music Collection on last.fm, a user with the handle AndretheDark boasts of his hoard of 30,281 songs. It would take him 94 days to listen to each one. With a catalogue of more than 75,000, Pale_Court has him beat. She writes that her music pile takes up 368 gigabytes of space, and counting.

In the era of hard drives measured in terabytes, anything less than 10,000 songs is modest. Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, says larger hard drives are pushing the number of illegal downloads worldwide past the 15-billion-song mark, and some are gorging at the trough with insatiable appetites.

"There's a really significant population who are downloading hundreds of songs a month - more than you could listen to if all you did is listen to them," says Garland, whose online media metrics company was among the first to chart the popularity of illegal downloads. "Are these people who are feeding at the all-you-can eat buffet of free music greedy? The answer, by the numbers, is absolutely. They eat till they make themselves sick. People hoard music that they never even listen to."

The music industry is so worried that the Canadian Association of Songwriters has proposed slapping a $5 levy on every Internet subscription, with the money to be distributed to musicians. Even prince of darkness Ozzy Osbourne has complained that sales of his latest album, Black Rain, have been "suffering terribly" because people are helping themselves to left-click discounts.

On the face of it, hoarding tens of thousands of digital music files for which one has paid nothing looks like greed, plain and simple. Economists, however, are accustomed to soberly examining human beings' acquistive tendencies while declining to moralize. For analysts of digital downloading trends, the question is often not whether music piracy is wrong: It's whether the greed (or rather, self-interest) of digital packrats can create positive externalities (that is, benefits) for others.

"We do not use the term ‘greed.' We never try to put that label on it. You want to find out why this phenomenon is happening," says Sudip Bhattacharjee, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut's school of business. "We always try to understand the ‘why' of it. We look at it from an economic perspective."

Bhattacharjee has spent much of this decade studying the behaviour and motives of digital pirates and their effect on music sales. His research has indicated that chronic downloaders' collecting is often as much about sharing as it is about owning music for themselves.

"Almost all college students are on Facebook, and the reason is they want to know about others and let others know about themselves," he says. "Music is a great way of letting other people know about themselves: This is what my taste is, these are my favourite artists."

Mega-collections then become music libraries for others. Keiran Reilly's collection of 4,477 songs (about 12½ days' worth) looks puny by comparison to some of the libraries on last.fm, but it's as much as he can possibly store. "The biggest thing that's keeping me from getting more music is that I've run out of space on my computer," says the 29-year-old Torontonian. He has 1½ gigabytes of hard drive space left, "which is barely enough to run the computer." He estimates around 75%-80% of his stockpile was downloaded without paying via a peer-to-peer application called Azureus.

Reilly (his name has been changed) is a connoisseur of genres some people have never heard of. His playlists of late have been built around Calle 13, Alexis y Fido and Daddy Yankee - Puerto Rican stars of reggaetón, which he describes as "salsa-infused Latin hip-hop." He's proof of the idea that the larger and more varied one's shared music collection becomes, the more one is doing musicians' marketing for them. You don't even need to be linked to Reilly's collection online to benefit from his collection of reggaetón. You just need to be in his car.

"If anything, having a larger library allows me to share more," Reilly says. "With the recent fad of reggaetón in my life, it's funny how many people have been in my car and said, ‘Wow, what is this? Where can I get more of this?

"That's totally exposing them to more music. The fact that I have more music available to me and I can easily create a high-quality copy means I'm sharing stuff to other people that they otherwise wouldn't be exposed to at all."

Research backs up the idea that free downloading gives breaks to smaller artists. In a 2002 paper titled Stardom, Peer-to-Peer and the Socially Optimal Distribution of Music, M.X. Zhang of the Sloan School of Management at MIT argued that marginal and up-and-coming musicians benefit from the way file sharing disseminates their music from hard drive to hard drive. In a 2003 review of the economics literature about digital piracy for the German economics institute CESifo, researchers Martin Peitz and Patrick Waelbroeck summarized Zhang's findings: With the help of peer-to-peer networks, "marginal artists can gain from the exposure effect ... in an asymmetric world (with stars and niche performers), the current techonology [i.e., CDs] favours the promotion of stars. With digital copies, niche performers can more easily access consumers."

As well as the star system, illegal downloading discourages another strategy from the CD era that was designed to maximize record companies' profits by reaching deeper into customers' pockets: the packaging of songs into albums. Economists refer to this kind of sales strategy as "bundling."

"For example, we see bundling going on when we see a toothbrush sold with toothpaste," Bhattacharjee says. "What is an album? It is basically a bundle of songs. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good. A lot of consumers have indicated they do not like bundling."

Garland recalls that prior to the advent of CDs in the 1980s, the music industry generally divided its sales between singles and LPs. "In the days of vinyl, a song was pretty cheap." Then, he says, "The industry got greedy."

In the era of the compact disc, the single all but disappeared. Consumers were forced to spend $15 or more on an album, buying 10 songs they didn't want in order to get the one song they did.

The result? "Oh my God, they minted money," Garland says. "The torrential downpour of cash from the late '80s through the middle '90s was unprecedented. If you talk to the executives and the artists who were there during this gold rush and they talk about it like Camelot, as a time when all you had to do was show up in the morning and you got rich."

Through interviews and focus group sessions with digital packrats, Bhattacharjee and Garland have both concluded that many people are motivated to download songs for free in retaliation for what they perceive as the greed of the recording industry.

"One of the drivers in the customers' greed is vengeance. People feel that they were exploited by the music industry for years," Garland says. "People justified downloading music for free by saying, ‘The music industry stole from me and my parents, and now it's our turn.' "

Today the big four record companies are back to where they were in the 1970s and prior: Having to sell each song individually, even to the customers willing to pay full price. Sounds like a victory for the listener.

The economic arguments in favour of file sharing should not be interpreted to suggest you shouldn't pay. In fact, there's never been a better time to buy music legitimately, and it could be argued that the average, conscientious consumer has greed to thank for it. If not for the popularity of the original, all-free version of Napster around the turn of the century, Garland says, legitimate music download sites - such as iTunes, Canada's Puretracks and the contemporary, for-pay version of Napster - might never have developed in the first place.

At the very least, competition from illegal downloading motivates for-pay sites to offer the customer the best deal possible. Fortunately for the recording industry, it is possible to offer a better deal than free. As economists observe, "cost" does not merely refer to money.

"Going to an illegal site has its costs," Bhattacharjee says. "The time you spend searching and the time you spend downloading. When you download something illegally there's a very high chance there will be a virus in that, so you are killing your own machine. And the whole idea that you are doing an illegal activity and you may be caught. When you download an illegal file, very often it is not of high quality. These are all things that deter you from going the illegal way."

Given the pains of piracy, it's not surprising that more and more consumers are choosing to spend a dollar a song instead. "It is a much more satisfying experience than going to an illegal site," Bhattacharjee says.

Techonology may have changed the game, in other words, but the recording industry could still win it. If greed got them into this mess, greed can get them out.

But even if the recording industry triumphs in the battle for some hard drives, the consumer has already won the war. Thanks to innovations forced on the industry by illegal downloading, Garland says the 21st-century model would favour the little guy even if everyone started paying for every track tomorrow.

"As it turns out, iTunes and their ilk are almost as bad for big music as people downloading songs for free. It's devastated the business," he says. Garland has explained to record company executives, " ‘If you guys could obliterate piracy and replace it with people buying songs a buck at a time ... people are spending [a dollar] instead of $18.' You're arguing about the difference between losing 100% of your gross and losing 90%-plus."

Either way, the listener wins, and not because anyone is deliberately arranging for it to be so. For it is not from the benevolence of the record company, nor the artist, nor Apple - nor indeed of the digital packrat - that we expect to be able to download a track from iTunes for 99¢ with little or no hassle. It is from their regard to their own self-interest. Adam Smith might have liked the sound of that.
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/story.html?id=412792





CBS Moves Ahead With Layoffs in News
Bill Carter

News operations at CBS stations in several cities started a series of job cuts this week even as the CBS News network moved ahead with plans to lay off about 1 percent of its nearly 1,200 employees.

Over the last several days, layoffs were ordered at local stations that CBS owns, including ones in New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco. Dana McClintock, a spokesman for CBS, said the actions at the network and the local stations were not related.
“This is not the result of any corporate mandate,” Mr. McClintock said. The moves are the latest in a wave of cuts at news operations in both television and print organizations.

The cuts at the local stations owned by CBS were related to the financial performance of the station group in the first quarter of 2008, a CBS station executive said. The executive, who requested anonymity because the company was restricting comment on the moves, said that CBS had not issued a corporate order to cut jobs but that the stations “had to deal with their budget numbers.”

The executive added, “It looks big and ugly, but it’s not something that was ordered from on high.”

CBS revenues declined 14.6 percent in the fourth quarter. Like most media stocks, the share price has also been in decline, down almost 20 percent for the year.

At the network news division, the cuts will not include any on-air staff members, CBS executives said, and are concentrated mainly on technical and support personnel. The “Evening News” program will not be affected, CBS said.

But the cuts will be felt at “The Early Show,” which is losing five employees. Those layoffs come on top of an exodus in the last several months of more than 20 people during an upheaval that brought in a new executive producer, Shelley Ross, who was fired six months later. Some of the jobs now vacant will be retained, CBS executives said, but others will be eliminated.

If the numbers remain as announced, job cuts at CBS News will be less than those at its news counterparts at ABC and NBC. Sandy Genelius, the spokeswoman for CBS News, said some jobs were being redefined and others would be open to be filled by others.

ABC News announced last week that it was eliminating about 20 jobs (though an ABC spokesman said other positions will be added, keeping the overall job loss to less than 10 positions). The division president, David Westin, has said he intends to cut about 30 jobs by next year.

NBC News ordered a series of job cutbacks two years ago as part of a companywide initiative called NBC 2.0, which set a goal of cutting 700 positions by the end of this year. About 30 of those cuts have come from inside NBC’s news operation, which is much larger than CBS’s because it includes a separate cable news channel, MSNBC.

The NBC initiative did involve cuts in the news operations of the stations it owns in cities including New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

Not all the 29 CBS stations enacted cuts this week, but most of the biggest ones did.

The cuts have generally been from 3 percent to 5 percent of each station’s staff, with WBZ in Boston apparently making the biggest reduction, paring about 20 positions. WBBM in Chicago cut about 17 jobs; KPIX in San Francisco dropped 14 positions; KYW in Philadelphia cut 12; KDKA in Pittsburgh and KOVR in Sacramento each dropped 10 and KCNC in Denver, 6. In addition, stations in Los Angeles, Dallas and Minneapolis cut an undisclosed number of positions.

In all those cases, on-air staff members were dropped, including many reporters long familiar to viewers. That was the case at WCBS in New York. Those cut there included two longtime reporters, Andrew Kirtzman and Scott Weinberger.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/bu...dia/02cbs.html





Spy My Ride: Somebody May be Tracking Your Vehicle and You Don't Know About it!

New technologies always come with privacy issues

There is no shortage of articles discussing privacy issues introduced by new technologies. ReadID, passports, chips in currency bills, and other engineering marvels designed for purposes of tracking and monitoring, always come with a bouquet of questions and privacy concerns. On the other hand, technologies not specifically designed for monitoring can sometimes be used for this very purpose and privacy problems introduced by them are often overlooked. Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) is one of those technologies.

What is TPMS?

TPMS lets on-board vehicle computers measure air pressure in the tires. If you purchased a new vehicle in the last 2 years, it is very likely that it came with TPMS. If you live in the Unites States, your next vehicle will contain TPMS whether you like or not -- in April 2005, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a rule requiring automakers to install TPMS sensors in all new passenger cars and trucks starting in September 2007.

The first passenger vehicle to adopt TPMS was the Porshe 959 (1986); it measured tire pressure indirectly, and it did not use radio frequency (RF) to transmit information. Battery-powered wireless TPMS that directly measure air pressure in the tires appeared in the late 90's. Within a decade, the technology substantially advanced and was adopted by many auto-manufacturers. More high-level information about TPMS history can be found on this Wikipedia page

How does TPMS work?

In a typical TPMS, each wheel of the vehicle contains a device (TPMS sensor) - usually attached to the inflation valve - that measures air pressure and, optionally, temperature, vehicle state (moving or not), and the health of the sensor's battery. Each sensor transmits this information (either periodically or upon request) to the on-board computer in the vehicle. To differentiate between its own wheels and wheels of the vehicle in the next lane, each TPMS sensor contains a unique id. The receiver is "paired" to the sensors very much as a Bluetooth device. The vast majority of TPMS sensors transmit information in clear text using one of the assigned radio frequencies (typically, 315MHz or 433MHz).

TPMS transmits data that uniquely identifies your car!

Here is where privacy problems become obvious: Each wheel of the vehicle transmits a unique ID, easily readable using off-the-shelf receiver. Although the transmitter’s power is very low, the signal is still readable from a fair distance using a good directional antenna.

Remember the paper that discussed how Bluetooth radios in cell phones can be used to track their owners? The problem with TPMS is incomparably bigger, because the lifespan of a typical cell phone is around 2 years and you can turn the Bluetooth radio off in most of them. On the contrary, TPMS cannot be turned off. It comes with a built-in battery that lasts 7 to 10 years, and the battery-less TPMS sensors are ready to hit the market in 2010. It does not matter how long you own the vehicle – transportation authorities keep up-to-date information about vehicle ownership.

Why is this a problem?

What problems exactly does the TPMS introduce? If you live in the United States, chances are, you have heard about the “traffic-improving” ideas where transportation authorities looked for the possibility to track all vehicles in nearly real time in order to issue speeding tickets or impose mileage-adjusted taxes. Those ideas caused a flood of privacy debates, but fortunately, it turned out that it was not technically of financially feasible to implement such a system within the next 5-10 years, so the hype quickly died out.

Guess what? With minor limitations, TPMS can be used for the very purpose of tracking your vehicle in real time with no substantial investments! TPMS can also be used to measure the speed of your vehicle. Similarly to highway/freeway speed sensors that measure traffic speed, TPMS readers can be installed in pairs to measure how quick your vehicle goes over a predefined distance. Technically, it is even plausible to use existing speed sensors to read TPMS data!

Note that unlike traffic sensors that measure speed anonymously, TPMS can be used to measure speed of each individual vehicle because car manufacturers know serial numbers of every part in your vehicle, including unique IDs of TPMS sensors.

Now, no article is complete unless it mentions terrorists. Bad news, everyone (terrorists of all levels of badness -- rejoice)! It is now super easy to blow up someone's car. There's no need to fix the explosive to the vehicle. No more wires and buttons. No human factor. A high-school kid with passion for electronics can assemble a device that will trigger the detonator when the right vehicle passes by. (Movie directors, beware - I will go after you if I see this in the next blockbuster).

Aren't we being tracked already?

Yes, many vehicles already come with advanced tracking technologies, like OnStar, but they usually offered as options, so if you do not appreciate the possibility for OnStar support people to eavesdrop on the conversations in your vehicle (yes, they can do that), you can say "no, thank you" to the dealer, or, as the last resort, disable the evil device by cutting its power supply. TPMS cannot be easily disabled: you need to take the tire off the wheel to access the device.

As every other tracking technology, the TPMS was introduced as a safety feature “for your protection”. One might wonder why NTHSA (a government agency) would care so much about a small number of accidents related to under-pressurized tires. And why would it choose to mandate TPMS and not run-flat technology? Are we being tracked already? I hope not.

Can this problem be solved?

Yes, if it gets enough attention. Many chip manufacturers produce TPMS IC sets (for sensors and receivers). If they add functionality to encrypt the communication channel, the problem will go away. Note the similarity to the keyless entry remote controllers. Initially, the remote controllers did not use any encryption, but when carjackers started to sniff communications and replay them to unlock vehicles, a complex rolling code and encryption functionalities were implemented. Similar solutions can be adopted for TPMS.
http://www.hexview.com/sdp/node/44





Intel Makes a Push Into Pocket-Size Internet Devices
John Markoff

Intel plans to proclaim Wednesday in Shanghai that the next big thing in consumer gadgets will be the “Internet in your pocket.”

The challenge for the giant chip maker will be to prove that it is not too late to a market that has rapidly become the hottest spot in the consumer electronics business in a post-PC era.

At a developer event in China, the company, based in Santa Clara, Calif., will display a range of wireless Internet devices that Intel believes will fill a gap between smartphones and laptops. The company is hoping to capitalize on the success that Apple has had with its iPhone, which is one of the most popular mobile Web smartphones.

Intel is calling the new computers Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, and claims that it will have a significant advantage over makers of chips for cellphones because the Intel version will be highly compatible with the company’s laptop and desktop processors for which most Web software is written today.

The first generation of Intel’s MID technology will be aimed at data, not voice communications, leaving the company out of the market for smartphones. That has not damped the enthusiasm of Intel executives who foresee a proliferation of devices ranging from advanced ultracompact laptops to small, tablet-size devices that will be used for browsing the Web, navigation and Internet chat, rather than voice communications.

“What enables the innovation is the ability to bring over all the existing PC applications,” said Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of the company’s Ultra Mobility Group.

The weak link in the Intel strategy is that voice communication remains a significant factor for consumers choosing to buy hand-held devices.

Intel backed out of the cellphone market two years ago when it sold its Xscale microprocessor business to the Marvell Technology Group. Intel then set out on an ambitious redesign project for ultralow-power versions of its PC-oriented X86 chips. The current system requires two chips, one for the processor and one for peripherals. It will take the company another technology generation to place everything on a single chip.

That leads some analysts to believe that the company’s real breakthrough will not come until 2009 or 2010, when a new processor, now code-named Moorestown, arrives.

“We’re pretty bullish on it with some qualifications,” said Van L. Baker, a research vice president at the Gartner Group, a market research firm. “We don’t believe they get there in a significant way until the next generation of technology.”

Meanwhile, Intel’s strategy is moving the company toward a direct confrontation with Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chip maker that is also trying to deliver the wireless Internet on hand-held devices. The company, which refers to its strategy as “pocketable computing,” is offering a competing chip that offers lower power consumption and which is aimed for devices that blend voice and Internet data.

“We need to deliver an Internet experience that is like the desktop,” said Sanjay Jha, Qualcomm’s chief operating officer. “People are used to the Internet, and you can’t shortchange them.”

The new Intel mobile Internet strategy takes advantage of the company’s Atom microprocessor, which was announced in early March. The Atom will have performance roughly equivalent to laptop computers introduced four years ago, but will use little more than a half-a-watt to two-and-a-half watts of battery power. That is significantly lower than the 35 watts of power consumed by the company’s state-of-the-art microprocessors in today’s laptops.

The new MIDs, which are scheduled to begin showing up in consumer electronics outlets in June, are the clearest evidence to date of the effort that Intel has made since its chief executive, Paul Otellini, set the company on a low-power strategy in 2005. In interviews, Intel executives said that the company was slightly ahead of the commitment Mr. Otellini made to bring out a line of lower-power processors before the end of the decade.

Complicating life for Intel is the fact that the chip maker is locked out of the low-power cellphone and smartphone marketplace, which today is entirely based on microprocessor chips made by designs licensed from the British design firm ARM Ltd. to companies like Qualcomm.

More than 10 billion ARM chips have been sold by more than 200 licensees, and ARM now says that more than eight million chips a day are being used in cellphones, smartphones and a wide range of hand-held consumer products.

Until recently, early efforts by the PC industry to create so-called palmtop PCs, such as the Microsoft-inspired Ultra-Mobile PCs, have failed to find a broad consumer audience. Indeed, the entire P.D.A., or personal digital assistant, market is all but dead as many of its functions were overtaken by the smartphone.

However, the category showed renewed signs of life last year when Asus, a Taiwanese equipment maker, made a name for itself by introducing the Eee PC, a two-pound Linux-based laptop that sells for $400.

Now many of the mainstream PC makers are rushing to introduce similar laptops that fall well below the traditional PC laptop price, but allow Web surfing and many basic computing tasks. There is also renewed interest among consumer electronics makers in devices that are neither laptops or cellphones.

Introducing products at the Intel event in Shanghai will be Asus, BenQ, Clarion, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, Lenovo, LG-E, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, WiBrain and Usi. Intel has also distanced itself from its traditionally close relationship with Microsoft and Windows by striking up a new partnership with Ubuntu and Red Flag, two distributors of Linux software for consumer markets.

“Think of it as, ‘honey I shrunk the PC,’ ” said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a consumer electronics market research and consulting firm. “Intel is betting that this will be a win in China, which already has the world’s largest mobile phone market and therefore influences the rest of the world market.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/te...gy/02chip.html





Gartner: Open Source Will Quietly Take Over

Open source will soon be in every organisation predicts a Gartner report, although IT managers may not be aware it is happening

In a few years' time, almost all businesses will use open source, according to Gartner; even though IT managers may be unaware of it, and prefer to talk about fashions such as software as a service.

Open-source promoters have welcomed the endorsement by what is seen as a conservative commentator, but predict the changes will go further than Gartner assumes.

"By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms," predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a "stealth" impact for the technology in embedded form: "Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition."

However, Gartner argues that at the operating-system level, Linux deployments are showing smaller benefits in total cost of ownership (TCO) as it is applied to more demanding projects, because of the technical skills required to use it: "Much of the availability, management and DBMS licensing costs will remain proprietary," says the report, and "version control and incompatibilities will continue to plague open-source OSs and associated middleware".

"Gartner has woefully underestimated the penetration of open source," said Mark Taylor, president of promotion group the Open Source Consortium. "Everyone uses [open source] on a daily basis in services like Google."

However, he welcomed the analyst's prediction that open source would disappear from view: "Open source has been promoted since 1998. If it fades from view now, because it is embedded in the mainstream, that is exactly what we wanted."

Gartner has also underestimated the benefits of Linux, said Taylor: "There are a range of open-source business models, from a completely proprietary version where open source is used as a sprinkling of magic pixie dust, to a full-on, services-based deployment using a free Linux distribution. Gartner assumes that the pseudo-open proposition will hold sway, but companies change. They may initially need the reassurance of a proprietarised version of Linux but, in our experience, they are then increasingly happy to go to a services model, using a distribution like Debian."

Gartner misses the point that a free licence does more than cut the cost of ownership, said Taylor, pointing out that it provides other benefits. "Licensing is only a slice of the total cost, but historically, companies have only bought as many licences as they can afford. If you remove the licence cost, you may only remove three percent of the of total cost of the existing project, but you also remove the brakes — you massively expand the numbers that project can be rolled out to at no extra cost.

"Open source gives massive scalability at no transaction cost, for whatever you are doing," he said.

IT managers who simply want to cut costs will look to software as a service (SaaS) rather than open source, says the Gartner report. "More technically adventurous IT projects will often prefer the direct use of open source and on-premises software development, but the mainstream IT organisation looking to reduce the IT cost burden will tend to choose SaaS where it is available."

This is nothing more than marketing-speak, said Taylor: "It's a very superficial analysis," he said. "The two will become almost indistinguishable as 98 to 99 percent of SaaS will be open source." And Gartner agrees that, by 2011, open source will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1...9379900,00.htm





Microsoft Extends XP Through 2010 for Ultra-Low-Cost Laptops
Elizabeth Montalbano

Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs beyond the current deadline of June 30, 2008, to accommodate a new class of ultra-low-cost PCs (ULCPCs) that are just beginning to pepper the market.

Windows XP Home will be available for OEMs to install on ULCPCs either until June 30, 2010, or one year after the availability of the next client version of Windows, code-named Windows 7 -- whichever date comes later. The IDG News Service previously reported that Microsoft would extend XP's life for these machines.

Though Microsoft has not yet revealed when it expects Windows 7 to be released, it's safe to say the OS either will be available before June 30, 2010, or Microsoft at least will have an idea by then of when it will be released.

"That is not an unreasonable presumption to make," said Kevin Kutz, director of Windows Client for Microsoft. The company has said it will release Windows 7 by the end of 2009 or early 2010, but has been vague about specific details or an exact release date.

Kutz stopped short of saying Microsoft is willing to extend the availability of a seven-year-old OS because it doesn't want to concede the ULCPC market to Linux, which many feel is the reason for the move. Instead, he said it's customers and partners who are driving the extension. "The feedback we've gotten from customers and partners is they want Windows on those devices," Kutz said.

At the same time he acknowledged that Microsoft, too, wants to see Windows on ULCPCs, and wants "to provide the best possible Windows experience for the device."

Still, if Microsoft is willing to allow OEMs to put a version of Windows on devices up to nine years past its release date when there will be not just one but two XP successors on the market, it's apparent the company recognizes a threat from Linux in that market. Linux is the OS running the current poster child for the low-cost laptop -- Asustek Computer's US$249 Eee PC, which was released in October and runs the Xandros distribution of Linux.

Linux also was supposed to be the OS for a forthcoming line of ULCPCs based on new Intel Atom processors that are due out later this year, laptops Intel is calling Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). In the past, Intel had said the MIDs would run Linux and established an effort, called Moblin.org, to develop a version of the open-source software for the devices.

However, Intel's Gary Willihnganz, director of marketing for its Ultra Mobility Group, said this week that both Windows XP and Vista also will run on the Atom-based MIDs in addition to Linux. He even suggested that the devices will be designed with support for Vista in mind, by saying the new platform will "be enabled" for both XP and Vista.

Since Intel's MIDs are not expected to be available until after XP's current June 30, 2008 deadline, this likely inspired Microsoft to change its XP availability policy. On the ULCPCs that are currently available for the market, Vista is not an option because of its memory and hard-drive requirements. Kutz said Thursday that Microsoft has no plans to change Vista to make it more suitable for ULCPCs, and hinted that forthcoming ULCPCs will evolve to the point that they can run Vista.

"It depends on what an ULCPC becomes over time," he said. "Right now we're enabling as much flexibility and choice as possible."
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008...w-cost-laptops





Gates: Windows 7 May Come 'in the Next Year'
Ina Fried

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday indicated that Windows 7, the next major version of Windows, could come within the next year, far ahead of the development schedule previously indicated by the software maker.

In response to a question about Windows Vista, Gates, speaking before the Inter-American Development Bank here, said: "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version." Referring to Windows 7, the code name for the next full release of Windows client software, Gates said: "I'm super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways."

Most of Gates' speech was devoted to topics closer to home for the crowd, such as how Latin America can be more competitive.

Windows 7 and its intended feature list have been the topic of speculation since Microsoft discussed some details of the new software last summer.

At that time, Microsoft said little except that Windows 7 will ship in consumer and business versions, and in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The company also confirmed that it is considering a subscription model to complement Windows, but did not provide specifics or a time frame.

Less than 24 hours ago, a Microsoft representative told CNET News.com that the company expects to ship the successor to Vista roughly three years from Vista's January 2007 debut.

Unclear is whether Gates was referring to early testing of Windows 7 coming within the year, as opposed to a widespread release or debut. An early test geared toward developers would be conceivable. The company has repeatedly said that it will accelerate the development of new Windows versions, largely as a response to Vista's roughly five year gestation period.

Microsoft on Thursday declined to extend a lifeline for Windows XP, saying that only a limited number of specialized machines will be sold with the operating system after June.

The company said it will continue to allow Windows XP Home edition to be sold for a class of computers it calls "ultra-low-cost PCs."

Vista, the current version of Windows, has sold well, according to Microsoft. But the operating system's debut was marred by repeated delays and shifting feature lists. Last week, Microsoft stepped up efforts to drive adoption of Vista by businesses.

CNET News.com's Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.
http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9911470-56.html





Office Open XML Officially Approved As International Standard
Kaitlin Mara

The much-debated open document standard Office Open XML (OOXML) has been approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), according to a document obtained by Intellectual Property Watch.

The result of the voting showed 24 supporting votes by participating national standards bodies allowed to vote, known as “p-members,” versus eight opposing votes. This translates to a 75 percent approval rating among bodies which cast a vote, greater than the two-thirds approval required for approval by ISO. However, nine national standards bodies who abstained from voting were not included in this calculation.

The Microsoft document standard, which is a 6,000 page set of specifications, has been hotly contested, culminating in two parallel meetings in Geneva this February (IPW, Access to Knowledge, 27 February 2008): one, the Ballot Resolution Meeting meant to resolve technical issues with the specification before approval as a standard and the other, called OpenForum Europe, in which free software and rival Open Document Format supporters called for the rejection of OOXML.

Though the public announcement has not been made, Ecma, an industry standards-making body that had approved OOXML previously, has released a press statement welcoming the approval, with secretary general Istvan Sebestyen calling it “an important milestone.” Microsoft’s statement hailed the appearance of “extremely broad support” for the standard at the end of the ISO voting process.

Opponents of the OOXML standard disagree about the support, and accused Microsoft of irregularities during the voting process (IPW, Access to Knowledge, 29 February 2008). Knowledge Ecology International released an early statement saying it was “disappointed” about the likely approval and that “Microsoft’s control over document formats has destroyed competition on the desktop.”

Several other sources have raised questions about apparent last-minute vote changes, with several countries changing their votes from disapproval or abstention to approval in the eleventh hour, they said. Most notable of these is Norway, whose reportedly last-minute “yes” vote has raised questions about legitimacy, according to a Norwegian IT blog.

The ISO is a 157-member network of national standards bodies based in Geneva.
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=986





XP RFID Encryption Cracked
Christoph Hammerschmidt

The Chaos Computer Club (Hamburg, Germany) has cracked the encryption scheme of NXPs popular Mifare Classic RFID chip. The device is used in many contactless smartcard applications including fare collection, loyalty cards or access control cards. NXP downplays the significance of the hack.

According to a report in Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Chaos Computer Club (CCC) experts along with colleagues from the University of Virginia cracked the encoding scheme with little effort. The achievement allows the crackers to read out data, recharge payment cards, copy RFID cards or generate "new" users.

The Mifare Classic family is sold in large volumes. Its memory sports a capacity of 1 to 4 kByte, explained a spokesperson in NXPs Austrian RFID competence center. Since it is in the market since the mid-nineties, the proprietary 48-bit encoding scheme is not necessarily up to today's requirements. Nevertheless, NXP sees no necessity to modify the encryption.

The spokesperson pointed out that the company also offers other RFID chips with higher security up to Triple DES or AES. "We will inform our customers about the incident", the spokesperson said. But it is the decision of the system integrator or customer if he will continue to rely on the Mifare Classic. "There are certainly applications for which the Classic can be used. We have not plans to withdraw the product from the market."

The spokesperson also pointed out that the Mifare Classic is not used in security-critical applications such as passports or electronic health cards.

The Chaos Computer Club was not available for comment.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s... ID=207000946





Europe Debates Cybercrime Law Enforcement in NATO, Council of Europe Meetings
AP

Two groups working separately to boost Europe's defenses against online crime will present proposals this week, almost a year after most of the nation of Estonia's links to the Internet were disrupted for days or weeks.

At a two-day conference starting Tuesday in Strasbourg, France, the Council of Europe will to review implementation of the international Convention on Cybercrime and discuss ways to improve international cooperation.

Cyber defense also will be on the agenda when heads of state from NATO's 26 member nations gather in Bucharest Wednesday for three days. The leaders are expected to debate new guidelines for coordinating cyber defense.

The Convention on Cybercrime, a binding treaty ratified by most members of the 47-nation Council of Europe, provide guidelines to protect computer users against hackers and Internet fraud.

The controversial agreement also covers electronic evidence used in prosecution of such offenses as child sexual exploitation, organized crime and terrorism. At this week's conference, the council will discuss guidelines to bolster the convention to improve cooperation between investigators and Internet providers, according to the council's Web site.

Participants and speakers at the conference - including police officials and representatives of technology companies such as Microsoft Corp., eBay Inc., McAfee Inc. and Symantec Inc. - also will address training.

NATO's three-day summit, which is to focus on enlarging the treaty organization and on its operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, will include a special briefing on cyber defense, according to the treaty organization's Web site.

Some cybercrime experts are casting current Internet security challenges in terms of terrorism, while others remain focused on data loss, identity theft and fraud.

Marco Gercke, lecturer in computer law at University of Cologne in Germany, said cybercrime poses new law enforcement challenges because data can now be exchanged very fast over vast international reaches.

"Compared to regular terror attacks, it is much easier for the offenders to hide their identity. There are at least 10 unique challenges that make it very difficult to fight computer-related crime," said Gercke, one of the conference participants. "The success rate of cybercrime is very high."

Privacy advocates, the American Civil Liberties Union and others are concerned that the Cybercrime Convention presses businesses and individuals to aid law enforcement in new ways and subjects them to surveillance that violates the U.S. Constitution.

President Bush signed the treaty in 2003 and the U.S. Senate ratified it in 2006. The convention has been ratified by 21 other nations.

The type of assault Estonian Internet service providers suffered - which included denial-of-service attacks, where criminals flood a server with so many requests for connections that it is overwhelmed - is particularly difficult to block because servers can't easily distinguish between legitimate and bogus requests for access, experts have said.

Estonian officials initially blamed the attacks on the Russian government but later acknowledged they had no proof of government involvement, though they said most of the computers launching the attacks were in Russia.

Estonia has set up a center to tackle computer-related crime and wants a global treaty on combatting cyber attacks because laws in many countries are inadequate or conflict, which can make prosecution of cyber criminals difficult.

The tiny Baltic state, which has one of the world's highest rates of Internet use, has said the attacks damaged its economy because it depends heavily on the Internet.

Russian officials deny any involvement in the cyber onslaught which erupted during violent protests by ethnic Russians against moving a Soviet-era monument out of the Estonian capital of Tallinn.

Web sites run by media outlets, government institutions and banks denied access to users outside Estonia. Among other impacts, Estonians traveling abroad couldn't get at their bank accounts.

The attack also included e-mail spam.

---

On the Net:

www.coe.int/cybercrime

http://www.nato.int/docu/update/2008...il/e0402b.html





NZ Teen Convicted of Cyber Crime
BBC

A New Zealand teenager accused of being the ringleader of an international cyber-crime network has been convicted.

Owen Thor Walker, 18, admitted six charges of using computers for illegal purposes and will be sentenced in May.

Police allege the group infiltrated more than one million computers and used them to skim at least $20.4m (£10.3m) from private bank accounts.

He was detained last November as part of an FBI investigation into global botnets - networks of hijacked PCs.

Exceptional talent

A botnet can be controlled over the internet by a single computer.

It installs malicious software on PCs around the world to collect information such as login names, bank account details and credit card numbers.

Walker pleaded guilty to charges of accessing a computer for dishonest purposes, interfering with computer systems, possession of software for committing crime and accessing computer systems without authorisation, the New Zealand Press Association said.

New Zealand police said he had begun committing the crimes at school, and had designed an encrypted virus that was undetectable by anti-virus software.

It allowed him access to usernames and passwords as well as credit card details, and was used by others to commit the frauds.

Walker faces up to five years in prison for several of the charges, but Judge Arthur Tompkins indicated he was not considering a custodial sentence.

Walker was detained in New Zealand's North Island city of Hamilton and is reported to have Asperger's syndrome - a neurobiological disorder which can result in deficiencies in social skills.

Although patients have normal intelligence, some may have exceptional talent in a specific area.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ic/7323733.stm





Virgin Media in Talks to Trial Three Strikes Regime Against P2P

Second time lucky for the BPI?
Chris Williams

Virgin Media could soon become the second major ISP to attempt to implement a "three strikes" system against illegal filesharers in partnership with the record industry.

The cable company is in talks with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) to trial a system of warnings, followed by disconnection, for the most persistent copyright infringers.

It's the same scheme that Tiscali briefly put in place last summer. That led to 4 customers being disconnected after allegedly ignoring the warnings, but relations between Tiscali and the BPI collapsed in a row over how the costs should be shared.

In a statement today, Virgin Media said: "We have been in discussions with rights holders organisations about how a voluntary scheme could work. We are taking this problem seriously and would favour a sensible voluntary solution."

A spokesman promised that customers will be told when any trial begins, but couldn't say when that will be.

Under the proposed three strikes rules, BPI enforcement agents will detect IP numbers participating in copyright-infringing peer to peer networks. They will alert the ISP, which will voluntarily send out warnings to stop or face disconnection from the net.

ISPs are under huge government pressure to agree to the scheme, or face legislation.

Similar moves are afoot in France and Japan.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03...three_strikes/





New Details Revealed of Music Industry Plan to OK P2P
Frank Rose

Details of a controversial plan to make money from music piracy are beginning to emerge.

Spearheaded by Warner Music Group, the plan aims to get internet service providers to pay a few dollars per user per month into a fund that would then be divided among rights holders. The scheme would essentially give P2P users a get-out-of-jail-free card for file sharing activity.

Wired.com has learned that industry consultant Jim Griffin, hired by Warner to implement the idea, has already set up an independent company to act as a digital-rights clearinghouse. Griffin's company would be like an ASCAP for the internet, collecting fees from ISPs and divvying them up among rights holders.

In addition, BigChampagne, a company that measures digital-media consumption, would be one of the major sources supplying the necessary data to track file sharing activity.

The hoped-for result: a truce in the music wars.

"The music industry has no choice," says Bob Kohn, a music-licensing expert and CEO of RoyaltyShare, which manages digital revenues for both majors and indies. "It's significantly weaker than it was in 2000. And the longer this drags on, the more difficult it will be to succeed."

In the last 10 years, sales of CDs have plummeted as digital downloads have exploded, and the U.S. music business has shrunk from about $15 billion to $10 billion.

The idea of charging a flat fee for 'all-you-can-eat' downloads is beginning to take off.

Apple is reportedly in talks to offer unlimited access to the iTunes library in return for a premium on the iPod. Nokia and Omnifone, a British wireless carrier, will later this year offer free music plans with cellphone contracts.

On Monday, the leading telco in Denmark, TDC, went live with a variant of Griffin's plan -- an unlimited-download offering from Warner, EMI, Sony BMG and a number of indie labels. Subscribers pay nothing extra; but the downloads expire if their contract isn't renewed. Other Scandinavian network operators are said to be interested in similar arrangements.

Discussions are also under way with North American universities. Both sides have ample reason to cut a deal. As a perceived file sharing hotbed, colleges are already facing -- and in some cases fighting -- demands to hand over students suspected of piracy. And for all their tough talk in public, the major labels would probably rather not start a fight with high-profile institutions.

So far, the rights organization Griffin heads has but one employee -- Griffin himself. Most of the details, including such basic issues as how much money the ISPs will be asked to cough up per user, are still to be determined.

"What remains to be sorted out," a senior executive at Warner says, "is basically everything."

Griffin did not return calls seeking comment.

To the extent that the Warner plan has been defined at all, it is essentially a covenant not to sue. Users would be free to download music from any site they like -- including Limewire, which has been sued by the music industry. ISPs would not be pressured to install expensive filtering mechanisms that might (or might not) be able to intercept illegitimate P2P traffic.

The question of whether internet providers should cover the music industry's losses from P2P has been a hot-button issue at least since Wired.com reported in mid-March that music labels were beginning to consider such a scheme. Now, news that Warner has hired Griffin to implement the idea -- an open secret in the industry for months -- is causing the controversy to boil over.

To many, the notion that internet service providers should pay money to rights holders -- music labels, artists, songwriters and publishers -- makes inherent sense. It's how songwriters and performers have long been reimbursed for radio airplay and the like, and how musicians and labels are paid for digital transmission via satellite or internet radio.

But to critics, among them influential bloggers like Michael Arrington of TechCruch, the idea smacks of a protection racket. Pay up, the music industry is telling users and ISPs, or be liable for legal action over P2P.

In fact, it's a classic example of collective licensing: Copyright holders grant a blanket license allowing use of their works in exchange for a fee. Its origins go back to 1847, when a composer named Ernest Bourget objected to his music being played for free at Les Ambassadeurs, a popular cafe in Paris. The litigation that followed led to the creation of SACEM, the first performing-rights organization and the model for ASCAP, which was established in the United States in 1914.

Complicating the issue are widespread misperceptions about what Griffin is trying to do. He is not, for example, heading a government initiative. No one anticipates laws forcing either music companies or ISPs to participate. And far from being initiated by the major labels, the idea is winning acceptance only after they resisted it for years as tantamount to legitimizing piracy.

Some wonder whether the moment has already passed. "People were excited about this idea in the last days of Napster," says Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne. "But the music companies were not only not receptive to it, they considered it treasonous. Now the music companies are desperate -- and people are saying, 'No, we had that conversation, and you said we'll see you in court.'"

Obviously, fees that are collected from businesses tend to get passed on to consumers. Thanks to Bourget, everyone who spends money at a restaurant or a store has to pay for the background music, like it or not. Most people never notice the bite. "When you pay the tab at a restaurant, there's no line item that says this is your licensed-music fee," Garland says. "But you'd better believe that every time you eat out, you're paying for it."

Then there's the question of who gets reimbursed and how—another sure source of controversy for Griffin.

Though Griffin's outfit is being incubated and funded by Warner, it's set up an independent company -- one that may ultimately be owned by rights holders collectively, as ASCAP and Broadcast Music are. Yet rather than pay artists and songwriters directly, the plan envisions the money going to music labels and publishers, which in turn will divvy up the proceeds.

This raises big questions for artists. Still to be determined, for example, is whether a download should be treated as a purchase, in which case the artists would get at most 10 percent of the proceeds, or as an audio stream, in which case they would get closer to 50 percent.

"That's a huge row that's coming up," says Peter Jenner, a longtime Griffin colleague who manages Billy Bragg and heads the International Music Managers Forum. "If we don't get our shit together soon, we'll get screwed by the record companies. I think everyone should stop whining and get on with making sure we don't get shafted like we did on the old business model."

Even if artists don't get screwed by the labels, they could still get shortchanged. How the pool of money from ISPs gets divvied up among them depends on how accurately file sharing gets reported. The long tail of all the world's recorded music is close to infinite, and that suggests that less-popular artists will almost surely get shortchanged.

Not so, Garland says. CDs have a habit of falling off trucks or coming in the back door. But online music -- whether it's delivered by file sharing, streaming or legal downloads -- can be tracked with precision, Garland says, because every packet carries unique identifiers. "I've seen information about bands that even I performed in," he claims. "They must have been downloaded by my ex-wife."

Peter Jenner has his doubts. What about bootlegs? Who owns the rights to them? "But we're trying to get money from places where nothing has been coming in," he says. "It's never going to be perfect -- but to say you shouldn't do it is a really stupid thing."
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m.../04/music_plan





Lawsuit Claim: Students' Lecture Notes Infringe on Professor's Copyright
Ryan Singel

University of Florida professor Michael Moulton thinks copyright law protects the lectures he gives to his students, and he's headed to court to prove it.

Moulton and his e-textbook publisher are suing Thomas Bean, who runs a company that repackages and sells student notes, arguing that the business is illegal since notes taken during college lectures violate the professor's copyright.

Faulkner Press filed suit in a Florida court Tuesday against the the owner of Einstein's Notes, which sells "study kits" for classes, including Professor Michael Moulton's course on "Wildlife Issues in the New Millennium."

Those notes are illegal, Faulkner and Moulton contend, since they are derivative works of the professor's copyrighted lectures.

If successful, the suit could put an end to a lucrative, but ethically murky businesses that have grown up around large universities to profit from students who don't always want to go to the classes they are paying for.

The suit could also have ramifications for more longstanding businesses such as Cliffs Notes, which summarize copyrighted novels.

Faulkner Press publishes two e-textbooks that Moulton wrote and uses in his classes, and sells its own set of class notes for the course.

But James Sullivan, Faulkner Press' attorney, says the suit isn't about money for the professors, it's about protecting its intellectual property.

"Students are buying a particular note packet to do well on a particular exam by a particular professor," Sullivan said. "The commercial appeal of the product is that it is a copy or close derivative work of that professor's intellectual property."

But if a professor's lectures are copyrighted, aren't students already infringing just by taking the notes in the first place?

Yes, Sullivan answers, student notes do infringe, but they are protected infringement.

"That's absolutely fair use," Sullivan said.

What if a student took notes, but didn't copy anything verbatim from a professor's lecture, and then decided to publish the notes online or sell them?

"While that may not be slavish copy, the notes would be a derivative work and a copyright holder has the exclusive right to create derivative notes," Sullivan said.

Sullivan says his case is more solid than a similar 1996 Florida lawsuit against a company called A-Plus Notes, which was rejected by the courts. Moulton has registered his copyrights, cleared them with the university and recorded his lectures.

"Professor Moulton used an overhead projector in class and would write out the high points of the lecture and that's what Einstein's Notes' note-taker would write down," says Sullivan. Moulton's writing on the transparency fixes the copyright, and the words can easily be compared to the student notes, he adds.

Einstein's Notes, which operates online as HowIgotAnA.com, pays students to write down what professors say in class so that the notes can be re-sold to other students in advance of exams, Sullivan claims.

He also notes that Einstein's Notes puts a copyright notice on the cheat sheets and prints its material with black ink on dark green paper in an attempt to thwart photocopying.

A less exotic copyright claim in the lawsuit alleges that Einstein's Notes also copied and reprinted hundreds of test prep questions included in the professor's text book and in his course software.

The lawsuit seeks any profits made off of the Moulton study guides.

Neither Einstein's Note's owner nor Professor Moulton responded to requests for comment.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...sues-note.html





Crabby Apple Bites Big Apple Over TM

Apple Computer says New York’s GreeNYC logo will confuse customers.
Hilary Potkewitz

New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs’ Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

The suit stems from New York’s environmental awareness campaign, GreeNYC, and its logo, which uses the outline of an apple, complete with a little leaf on top. Filed in September, the suit had gone unnoticed until this week. The California computer giant claims the drawing is too similar to its ubiquitous trademark.

The city’s response? Bite my apple.

New York City Corp. Counsel Michael Cardozo quickly filed a counterclaim to have Apple’s case thrown out, citing differences between both logos, and the fact that Apple Computer does not sell mugs, caps or other items, making confusion unlikely. He added that NYC & Company, the non-profit city marketing organization behind the logo, is dedicated to increasing tourism to New York and all of its sites—including the various Apple stores—ultimately benefiting the computer company.

As a concession, the city agreed to eliminate beer steins from its retail catalog because Apple Computer had previously filed for that particular use of its logo.

At the center of the controversy is the city program’s icon, a free-form sketch of Eve’s favorite fruit. In recent weeks that logo has started sprouting up on local bus shelters and on fashionable grocery sacs sold at Whole Foods Markets. The city plans to print it on T-shirts, caps, mugs and various other items throughout the Mayor Bloomberg-created campaign.

But according to the maker of Mac’s, that is not what the doctor ordered.

“[GreeNYC’s logo] so closely resembles Apple’s [logo] that its use is likely to cause confusion, mistake or deception in the minds of consumers,” wrote Apple Computer’s lawyers in their September filing with the Trademark Trial and Appeal board objecting to the logo.

The company cited its New York flagship store, the giant glass cube on 5th Avenue, as a tourist attraction, and claimed people walking around carrying bags, wearing caps or drinking out of bottles emblazoned with GreeNYC apples would “likely cause dilution of the distinctiveness of [Apple Computer’s brand], resulting in damage and injury to the company.”
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pb...7/newsletter01





Creative Climbs Down Over Home Brew Vista Drivers

Daniel-K slams 'arrogant and sarcastic' company
Richard Thurston

A Brazilian developer threatened with legal action by Creative for making its soundcards work better with Vista has had his work reinstated on the company's website.

Daniel Kawakami, better known by the moniker Daniel_K, modified a range of Creative's drivers to make the company's soundcards work smoothly with Windows Vista.

Without his modifications, users argue, Vista machines with Creative soundcards crash and features fail to work.

Posting a forum message on its website last weekend, Creative threatened Daniel_K with legal action, accusing him of infringing its intellectual property. The company removed forum posts from the developer containing links to his work.

The move backfired big time, generating a media firestorm and howls of protests from outraged users on technology forums across the web.

Guess what, Creative has reinstated Daniel_K's posts.

Creative declined to speak to The Register on the matter, but sent us this statement instead.

Quote:
We have read the strong feedback about Creative's forum post regarding driver development by daniel_k and other outside parties.
Creative's message tried to address our concern about the improper distribution of certain software, which is the property of other companies. However, we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties.

The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products.

Outside developers have been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our Sound Blaster products, and we do support and appreciate these efforts. This however does not extend to the unauthorized distribution of other companies' property.

We hope to work out a mutually agreeable method for working with daniel_k in supporting his efforts in driver development. Going forward, we are committed to doing a better job of working more closely with third parties to support their development for our products and our customers.
Daniel_K is incensed by Creative. "They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance," he told El Reg by email.

He told us that Creative contacted him on a chat session. "They were sarcastic, ironic and asked me if I wanted something from them, as if I were expecting something," he wrote. "It was my protest against them and would like to see how far it would go."

Enough reward

He acknowledges that Creative has a case regarding intellectual property, but is furious about the company's strategy. "I'd say they are stealing [from] their own customers by disabling features based on technologies they own (so they did it on purpose) and by charging for a software that requires an improved driver that they refuse to provide."

"At least they are getting flamed all over the web and they are certainly mad about it. That is enough reward for my hard work," he wrote.

Daniel_K's modified drivers have proved immensely popular, with 100,000 downloads in total, according to the developer.

Users had complained that, without them, Vista machines based on Creative's soundcards crashed and features failed.

Some forum posters have already suggested that, given Daniel_K's success in modifying its drivers, the company should offer him a job.

So The Register asked him if he would accept a job if offered by Creative.

"No."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04..._driver_links/





The Rec.humor.funny Ban

It all started in late 1988. rec.humor.funny had been running for around 17 months, and was doing very well. I had set up a system so that I could deposit accepted jokes into a queue directory, and once or twice a day, the computer would automatically select a random joke from the directory and post it to the net.

On November 9, 1988, the computer picked the following joke to post

The joke that made RHF infamous
brian@radio.uucp (Brian Glendenning)
Radio Astronomy, University of Toronto

( rec.humor, rec_humor_cull, racist (mildly), chuckle)



(Relayed From prabhu@mitisft)

A Scotsman and a Jew went to a restaurant. After a hearty meal, the waitress came by with the inevitable check. To the amazement of all, the Scotsman was heard to say, "I'll pay it!" and he actually did.

The next morning's newspaper carried the news item:

"JEWISH VENTRILOQUIST FOUND MURDERED IN BLIND ALLEY."

Now this joke has some mildly racist overtones, and so I made a minor mistake in forgetting to follow my usual policy on such jokes, namely to encode the joke in what is known as rot13 encoding.

Our policy here has always been to not judge jokes based on their politics, only on their comedy. This means that jokes like the above can make the cut.

The bad news was that November 9, 1988 was the 50th anniversary of Krystallnacht, the horrible night when the Nazis burned and smashed the property and temples of German Jews, considered by some to be the start of the worst of the holocaust.

This coincidence of dates proved to be too much for Jonathan E. D. Richmond, a graduate student at M.I.T. at the time. Richmond took serious offence and started a campaign against me on the net. That sort of thing (an offended person starting a posting campaign against something that offended them) happens all the time on the net, and by and large most people weren't offended at all. He called for me to be "replaced" as moderator, or barred from the net. He didn't realize that those things don't happen on the net, that it's an anarchy, and each person who builds something gets to run it and has no boss who can replace him or her.

Richmond was disturbed to find that just 4 other posters agreed with him. Just about everybody else laughed at his efforts -- or generally disagreed with the idea of anybody being censored for a politically incorrect joke or other posting. During the debate, in fact, a far nastier joke indirectly critical of Richmond appeared that ended up getting me in a bunch of trouble.

Usually, when would-be banners get derided, they go away, but Richmond was not to falter. First he called my company, hoping to get me fired. I do wish I had had the quickness to realize this and pretended to be my boss, so that I could assure Richmond that I would be fired, but alas I just told him that I owned the company.

He hunted around for a while and eventually called the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, the 85,000 circulation daily newspaper in the town in which I was living. At the Record, he found Louisa D'Amato, an Italian-Jewish reporter who was quite sympathetic to his complaint. I gave D'Amato a nice interview on the matter, since she pretended to be sympathetic to my view when she called me. (I've learned since then...)

Back in 1988, "Internet" was a new word and much of USENET flowed over plain old modem links via a protocol called UUCP. Usually one big site in a town would make the long distance call to bring in the news, and send out the few local articles that were generated, and other sites would talk to that site with local calls. So it was with my site and the University of Waterloo (my alma mater), which acted as hub for the area.

Richmond convinced D'Amato to write a very negative story on the idea of a joke forum where politically incorrect jokes could and did appear, and in particular on the idea that the University, acting as an ordinary USENET hub (like thousands of other universities around the world at the time) was facilitating all this.

The story she wrote appeared on the front page of the paper on December 1, 1988. I got permission from the Record to post it to the net.

Reaction

This story surprised me, and upped the stakes. Over the next week, stories appeared almost every day, either on the front page or on the front page of the local section. The citizens of the town actually took no notice of it, and in spite of D'Amato's thought that they would, but the University did. It had to be seen to act, or felt it did. It shut off my link, and said I could have it back if I agreed not to send jokes that were offensive or "in bad taste."

I said I would, and asked for the University's official guide to taste, but they never provided it.

The moment the word got out I had been banned from the University's computers, at least a dozen sites offered to call me directly to allow the feed of rec.humor.funny to go out to the world. So it was never off the air.

In the meantime, I decided to have fun with the University. I still did a feed to them, as well as the uncensored feed to the real world. But for the U's feed, any joke that was even mildly offensive was replaced with a message that had the same headers and title, but the body was replaced by a notice stating that the University had asked that jokes in bad taste not be sent to it. Sort of like the South African newspapers with the blank spots where censored stories used to be.

The rest of the world also covered the event, and Richmond also talked to reporters at his local Boston Herald. Whoops. They did a page 2 story on it which wasn't all that kind to Richmond. I can only assume that he realized the press was a dangerous tool. Getting me banned had not made him a popular figure at MIT or on the net, and he got hassled apparently as he walked around the campus, though nothing physical was done. At any rate, he never talked to the press again after that.

While stories were also done in the Toronto papers, it was odd that nobody noted the original joke was submitted by somebody at the University of Toronto.

I got pretty scared by the press over-attention, and did the smart thing and declined to talk to reporters. Since then I have never had anything but sympathy for those people whom Mike Wallace says, in a dour and critical voice, "refused to talk to 60 minutes."

The ban was in place, and hundreds of letters were written to the K-W Record (more than they got on any other issue that year -- that's the power of the net, even then) and to the University, but it seemed it was all settling down.

I only got one letter from the general public in this case. A big packet of apparently hand-typed-for-me notes from a Nazi living in Sarnia, Ontario. Not a neo-Nazi, but an "I fought for the Fuhrer in the war" Nazi, saying how great it was that people were telling Jewish jokes on the computer. One of the scariest things I ever got.

Good thing, I guess, that D'Amato failed to mention one minor detail in her story about me as leader of the network of anti-semitic computer nazis. I'm Jewish enough myself that had I lived there, Hitler might have put me and my family in the camps.

Of course, other than providing a harrowing week, being banned was great for business. I had just released the first jokebook based on rec.humor.funny, and had put "Banned at the University of Waterloo" stickers on them. I'm sure I sold a lot more books due to the ban. And rec.humor.funny quickly surged to become the most widely read thing on the net. That fame helped me start ClariNet, the largest circulation electronic newspaper on the Internet. Today our number of paying subscribers is more than 14 times that of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. This is a lesson for those who want to ban things -- in the end you only help the people you want to ban.

Is it over yet?

Early in 1989, when we thought the story was long gone, June Genis, a programmer at Stanford University, noted to her boss in passing that there had been this silly flap over politically incorrect jokes in rec.humor.funny. June's a libertarian, about as much against censorship as you can get, so she was shocked when her boss, hearing that another University had banned the group, decided that Stanford should ban it as well.

So they did, shutting off the group entirely. They argued that since rec.humor.funny was moderated, there was no place to complain. The kept the unmoderated rec.humor because people could counter the jokes there.

To this day nobody understood that logic or knows the real reason for the ban, but Stanford students and faculty got up in arms over the idea of the computer center deciding what was fit to read and what wasn't.

This time the press coverage was all anti-ban. Stanford's a bit more famous than the U. of Waterloo, so we saw stories and editorials in not just the major dailies of the S.F. Bay Area, but also in magazines like Fortune (see the Keeping Up column in the 1989 Fortune 500 issue), the New Scientist, Communications of the A.C.M. and others.

Stanford's administration found themselves looking like fools. John McCarthy, better known to many as the originator of the LISP computer language, called me up to say he would be leading the fight at Stanford to reverse the ban. Pressure by him and others caused the faculty senate to have the matter referred to the library committee. Anybody knows what a library committee is going to say about administrative bans of unpopular material. They reversed the ban, though it took a few months.

Stanford also at the time was having some controversy over other censorious policies, such as a "fighting words" doctrine and several others. These were also later overturned in a victory for academic freedom. I'm proud to have played a small part in helping this victory.

Waterloo, years later.

During the later years, UW played with banning other groups as well. So did other schools. A popular target are the alt.sex groups, and when they banned those it finally got the swell of popular opinion against group banning. John McCarthy also came up to give a talk in support of the anti-ban efforts. In late 1991, UW finally reversed the ban, much to my personal satisfaction, even though I left the city of Waterloo that year.

Lessons and Conclusions

It should be noted that I never challenged the right of UW or Stanford to ban my publication. As private institutions, they have the legal right to decide what is done with their computers. I, and many others, however, argued that it was a violation of the strong principles of academic freedom. A University, we feel, should not attempt to protect its students, and certainly not its faculty, from the offensive forms of expression in the real world. In fact, even if you wanted to argue that some things should be banned out in the world at large, Universities have a special history of being the exception.

It's sad that this has changed at some schools these days, and many people have vowed to continue to fight it.

Other notes

• Racism is a nasty accusation. If you're accused of it, don't even bother answering, you can't give the right answer. Avoid talking to the press, even if you are innocent, unless you really know what you are doing.
• On the other hand, being banned can do wonders for your visibility if the people who really count know you and know the truth. It can make you a lot of money.
• Censors will never win. As my friend John Gilmore has often been quoted as saying, "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That's an apt description of what happened both places it was banned, with tons of new paths being used to get the same data.
• Censors will do a lot of damage trying to win. The week of front-page coverage was very nerve-wracking. I'm thicker skinned now but for a while I thought the story was going to go seriously national, and people would say, "so this is what those computer nets are for." The story did go national years later, as the porn-on-the-net recurring story. I'm glad it wasn't me as the computer nazi showing up on a Time magazine cover.

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/rhfban.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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